Between the Poles

Signs of disruption in the construction industry

In his foresighted talk at Geo Business in London, industry insider Adam Box raised warning flags for the construction industry - if the industry is unable to change from within there are signs that major players outside the industry are beginning to do it.

Adam cited some of the big challenges facing the construction industry, notably the lack of productivity gain for the past 40-50 years and very low margins.  He sited data that the 10 largest construction companies with a total of £ 31 billion in turnover had a before taxes profit of 0.38 % - that's right, less than one per cent.  Some see this as the result of a lowest bid procurement model, but whatever the cause with the growing importance of attracting private investment in infrastructure construction, it is hard to see how this level of financial return is likely to attract interest from private investors. 

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure through 2030 to keep up with global GDP growth. This is a massive incentive for the  construction industry to transform productivity and project delivery through new technologies and improved practices

In a report McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption. The McKinsey report presents data that shows that large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile,  Construction has been slow to adopt process and technological innovations. R&D spending in construction lags other industries.  Construction R&D  is less than 1% of total industry revenue compared to 3.5-4.5 % in the auto and aerospace sectors.  And construction spending on IT is low compared to other industries.

Adam referred to some changes within the industry aimed at addressing the productivity problem such as modular construction and prefabrication, BIM, reality capture and modelling, and integrated building, but this has not had a major impact on the industry as a whole which in many countries represents 10% of GDP.  There are structural issues inhibiting improving productivity improvement - the traditional fragmented supply chain and an adversarial business model of construction are often cited.

There are a number of examples of industries that have faced similar problems and managed to transform the industry from within through IT - automobile manufacturing in Germany and Japan, low cost airlines worldwide, retail banking worldwide, optics in Germany and Japan, and others,  There are also other industries that did not see the writing on the wall and were transformed from without - the retail book industry and other retail sectors by Amazon, the taxi industry by Uber, hospitality by AirBnB, and others.

At a recent BIMForum conference in Las Vegas Dr. Barbara Jackson of the University of Denver offered what I would categorize as a hurricane warning to the construction industry; change is coming like a very fast train and either the industry has to change itself or someone from outside will do it. Because in construction resistance to change is much greater than the motivation to innovate and change, under 30 year olds are saying that the construction companies they want to work for don't exist, so they leave.  She hopes to help the industry to transform from within by effecting a culture change through encouraging the under 30s folks not to leave but to stay and transform the industry.

Adam sees signs that the industry is attracting interest from technologies and investors outside of the traditional construction industry.  He mentioned Elon Musk's Boring Company which already has municipal transportation projects in Chicago (won against industry veteran Mott MacDonald) as well as Las Vegas, Washington DC, and Los Angeles.  Google is building a city of the future in Toronto.  Amazon is selling entire houses for $20,000.  Wework is disrupting the commercial office space sector.  All of the big technology players (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook) are already indirectly disrupting the electric power generation industry with commitments to billions of dollars of renewable power generation which has driven over $15 billion in investment in wind and solar power generation.  Others like MGM are going off grid for their power.

If major owners see that working with the non-construction construction industry eliminates or reduces the likelihood of project overruns and reduces costs, what is now a trickle could become a stampede which will leave the traditional industry with the low margin projects while the new players cream off the exciting, new high margin projects.  Given the construction industry's traditional resistance to innovation, this is beginning to look more likely.

The future is fewer maps

At the first Longitude meetup in the U.K., organized by Ben Flanagan, Kenneth Field, and Chris Wesson, Ed Parsons presented his perspective on one of the directions to expect from geospatial in the future.  It was a bit counterintuitive, for consumers more geospatial data and technology, but fewer maps.

To start with he reminded us that the public has never had as much access to maps as we do now thanks primarily to Google Maps - either as standalone or embedded in other apps. What he foresees is that in future we will be seeing fewer maps or no maps at all.

The maps we have used up to now are large scale maps presenting a large scale view - probably very useful to Winston Churchill and people planning things on a large scale. But in our day to day life, we don't need maps at this scale. Instead we need to know what we will encounter in the next 15 minutes, whether that be the next exit off the highway or the next grocery store. There will be more interaction between us and the world around us - for example showing which of the nearby bars or coffee shops are very busy or less busy.

Ed gave a practical example that anyone who uses a smart phone to navigate in a place they have not been before can relate to. When you come out of a tube station or any GNSS-denied place you are always faced with a quandary - how to orient yourself to know whether to walk left or right. I mentally flip a coin and walk until my smart phone tells me if I am headed in the direction I want to go. If I am in a part of the city where GNSS is unreliable I walk to the end of the block and the street number or name usually will tell me if I am headed in the right direction or that I have to retrace my steps in the other direction.  In the future your navigation app won't rely solely on GNSS signals but will recognize buildings and give you the right direction. In fact this could all happen through an audible interface so that you needn't look at a map at all, "turn right as you leave exit 3 from the tube station".  Of course this will require a lot more spatial data about the city you are in and will require some serious geoanalytics.

What this suggests is that as consumers we will use more geospatial data and analytics, but it will become part of the technology stack and most of us won't realize how much geospatial technology we are using.

Geospatial + BIM interoperability essential for the development of smart cities

Integrated geospatial and BIM is increasingly being recognized as essential for full lifecycle construction and for enabling urban digital twins.  At this year's Geo Business in London the importance of integrating these technologies was asserted by several speakers.  From the perspective of developing smart cities, Hong Kong has made integrating these technologies a policy priority for its goal of becoming a smart city.

In an award winning paper at a 2011 conference organized by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century.  At that time within the UK construction company this was a radical suggestion, but since then the need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction in the construction industry.  Among the construction vendor community it was adopted by Bentley, Hexagon, and Trimble a number of years ago and in 2017 Autodesk also jumped on board, forming an alliance with ESRI.  At this year's Geo Business event in London the importance of an integrated geospatial and BIM approach in construction was recognized by several speakers.  For example, Marek Suchocki, Autodesk argued that GIS and BIM are not separate, quite a change for Autodesk compared to a couple of years ago.

Hong Kong has the highest population density (26,100 per km²) in the world.  In Hong Kong 50% of the construction industry is government providing government with a key role in moving the entire construction industry, both public and private, forward. The city is quite advanced in adopting BIM.  BIM is mandatory for projects over HK$30 million. The city has developed a BIM Data Repository prototype to allow BIM models of public structures to be shared among government departments and with the public.  BIM has been accepted for General Building Plan submission (permitting) and all of this has been done in collaboration with the Construction Industry Council (CIC).  Finally a study of BIM/GIS integration has been completed.

In his inspiring talk at Geo Business Thomas Chan, Director of Lands, Hong Kong SAR Government, asserted geospatial has to go hand in hand with BIM in creating the common spatial data infrastructure (CSDI) that will underpin Hong Kong as a smart city. As a basis for moving toward a smart city Hong Kong has adopted common spatial data infrastructure,  3D GIS city model, and open data as public policies.  The city has already initiated a pilot open CSDI data portal with over 70 data types available.   But the BIM-GIS integration study found that it is currently difficult to bring BIM models into GIS.  Thomas Chan mentioned the OGC standards CityGML and IndoorGML as essential smart city standards.  Research has shown these standards have some incompatibilities with buildingSmart BIM standards. He is strongly encouraging the geospatial and BIM communities to collaborate to ensure that BIM models submitted to the city can be easily brought into the city's CSDI.

I would suggest that the most important takeaway from this is that in addition to the now widely recognized benefits of geospatial+BIM integration for the construction industry, it is also essential for creating a common spatial data basis for smart cities.  If we cannot resolve AEC+geospatial interoperability now through collaborative work between the two communities, we will continue to be plagued by this issue for decades to come much as we have been by CAD/GIS incompatibility for the past 25 years.

Assessing the PAS 128 quality standard for underground utility location

A very interesting recent academic study from the University of Birmingham investigates the effectiveness of the British PAS128 standard for underground utilities.  Four different  utility survey specialist firms were invited to locate (without potholing) underground utilities in the same area.  They were asked to assign a PAS 128 quality level to each utility piece of underground utility equipment detected.  The researchers concluded that the agreement between the different locate companies was very good, although some equipment was not detected.  With respect to PAS 128 test pits revealed that achieving a high vertical accuracy was problematic.  While using multiple technologies for underground remote sensing increased the confidence in what was detected it did not increase the accuracy.

The survey area was a 15 m
by 20 m asphalt-covered car park surrounded by grass on two sides.  The site was chosen because it was sufficiently complex below ground to require distinction between utility networks and not subject to traffic. Four companies carried out the geophysical survey and returned their results with respect to a local grid. Following the analysis of the commercial subsurface utility surveys, a number of locations were suggested for trial pit excavations. The aim of these excavations was to reveal the physical nature of the assets detected by the subsurface scans and to evaluate whether the features detected were both complete and accurate. All data were captured in three dimensions – that is, plan locations and depths were recorded as related to a site grid. The trial pits were specifically located to confirm the presence or absence of recorded features and identify key feature types.

Comparing the results from the different companies it was found that there was good agreement for the different utility types especially for the water and telecoms networks. The biggest differences observed were for the drainage and electricity utility networks.  An electricity cable and a drainage pipe remained undetected by most of the companies.  The electricity cable was detected by only one of the survey companies, apparently because the cable carried a significant electrical load on the day that that company conducted its survey.  Missing a drainage pipe is probably not hazardous for the public and workers, but hitting an electric cable during excavation can have very serious consequences.  However, for an industry where the rate of detection is roughly 70% and decreasing as new types of buried equipment are being introduced, this is not a surprising result.

The researchers also assessed the PAS 128 quality level standards by digging test pits to verify location accuracy and identification of the type of utility equipment.  As a reminder PAS 128 Bx quality levels are defined as

                    XY                          Z
B4          Undefined            Undefined                       Undetected
B3         +/- 500mm       Not determined                    One geophysical technique
B2         +/- 250mm    +/- 40% of detected depth      One geophysical technique
B1         +/- 150mm    +/- 15% of detected depth      Two geophysical techniques

When comparing the results reported by the survey companies with the location and type of utility found through test pits it was found that the vertical accuracy corresponding to QLB1 was rarely achieved. Having two different technologies providing a strong signal indicating a buried feature increases the surveyor’s confidence in the detection of this asset, but does not increase the accuracy because each technology has its own accuracy depending, for example, on frequency, soil type and conditions, asset size and material.  I expect that the revision of PAS 128 currently underway will take this research into account.

Metje N, Hojjati A, Beck A and Rogers CDF, Improved underground utilities asset management – assessing the impact of the UK utility survey standard (PAS128), Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Municipal Engineer, https://doi.org/10.1680/jmuen.18.00055

City regulation reduces underground utility damage during excavations

Every year there are 400,000 incidents of damage to underground utilities during excavation in the U.S.  This is a world wide problem but some jurisdictions have found ways to reduce the number of underground utility hits.  For example, in 2016 Japan recorded 134 instances.  Another example is the City of Calgary which requires all network operators with underground infrastructure under public rights-of-way to submit to the city electronic as-builts showing the location of newly installed network equipment.  I have just received a copy of the City of Calgary Bylaw governing utilities in public rights-of-way.  It provides a model for any jurisdiction that wants to improve the quality of its information about the location of underground utilities. 

A number of years ago I did some work with a Calgary electric power utility involving replacing a paper-based records management system with one in which all geospatial data was stored in an Oracle RDBMS.  As a result the utility reduced its as-built and update backlogs to 24 hours.  This made it possible for the utility to provide up-to-date cable location information to the City of Calgary - referred to as Joint Utility Mapping Project (JUMP).  At that time the utility realized significant benefits from the shared underground utility information.   First of all, improved quality of service. A concrete example that every utility or telco can relate to is one-call. Prior to implementing their geospatial system, the utility maintained a fleet of 20 or so vans and roughly the same number of staff whose sole responsibility was cable locate which involved going out to the sites of a proposed excavations to identify where electrical cables and other infrastructure were to help excavators avoid damaging them. Before the JUMP shared database for very 1000 calls they received from contractors planning to excavate, on average there were nine incidents of damage or "hits", where the excavator dug up a cable and caused a power outage. After the JUMP implementation, the "hit" rate dropped 36-fold to 0.25 per 1000 calls. In addition because there was a single JUMP data store containing the location of all facilities in the city, they were able to reduce their cable locate fleet to something like two vans instead of 20, which saved the utility a not inconsiderable amount of money.  Secondly, the electric power regulator in Alberta was much happier because they saw an improvement in the quality of the utility's facilities data. Every year they required utilities to undergo an audit, where an independent auditor took a sample of facilities data out into the field and compared it with reality. The auditor reported something like 99.6% reliability, which is remarkable given that 70-80% is more typical of the industry.

I have just had a chance to go through the latest amended version of the city Bylaw (17M2016 with amendments in 2017 and 2018) the relevant details of which I thought it would be worthwhile to share.  The purpose of the Bylaw is to define how a network operator can access City rights-of-way such as roads for purposes of constructing, maintaining or operating its equipment including telecommunication, electrical, natural gas, steam, water wastewater and storm water facilities and pipelines.

The Bylaw includes provisions with some similarities to other jurisdictions in North America regarding existing infrastructure.  A network operator is required to provide the 3D location, line and elevation, of its equipment on public rights-of-way to the City within 5 business days of receiving the request from the City.  If requested the network operator must physically identify the location of its equipment by marking the service corridor and using paint, staking or another suitable method for identification.

The unique and interesting parts of this bylaw relate to new infrastructure. It requires submission of electronic as-builts by network operators, provides for on-site inspections to verify the as-builts, and assigns costs and liabilities for underground equipment whose location as reported in as-builts is unreliable.

The bylaw requires that each network operator submit as-built drawings in electronic format, typically DWG files, to the City within 60 calendar days following completion of installation of its equipment on a public right-of-way.  The as-builts are required to comply with two key provisions

1. The equipment is less than 35 centimeters horizontally and vertically from the centre line approved in the utility alignment permit
2. It adheres to the CSA S250 quality standard. 

The bylaw appears to have real teeth.  The City reserves the right to carry out on-site inspections the cost of which is shared between the network operator and the City.  The network operator is required to give the City 3 days’ notice prior to completion of work to allow for scheduling of the inspection.  If during an inspection (or at any other time) the City identifies deficiencies in the network operator’s compliance, the City can declare the equipment non-compliant.  The City can then take steps to ensure network operator does whatever is necessary, at the network operator's cost, to bring the equipment into compliance.  Specifically a network operator must pay for 100% of the direct costs for relocations of non-compliant equipment as well as indirect costs including any damages, liabilities, re-design costs and associated delay costs incurred by other participants in a public right of way resulting from the network operator's non-compliant equipment.

I see this as a model for any jurisdiction that wants to improve the reliability of the information about the location of underground utilities in public right-of-ways. 

Improving and sharing geospatial information about the subsurface in England

NEDO estimates that about 50% of time over-runs on commercial building projects are caused by unforeseen ground conditions.* There are two aspects to the problems associated with the subsurface.  One is geotechnics, soil, ground water, and geology conditions.  The other is the location of underground infrastructure, utilities, telecommunications and other cables and pipes. There are growing government, private sector and standards initiatives in both of these areas in the U.K. to improve the information and sharing of information about the subsurface.

Social driver: Public safety

Public safety is an important social driver for improving knowledge about the underground.  I remember attending a Pipeline Industries Guild (PIG) conference in Birmingham, U.K. in 2005 where the focus of the entire event was to motivate the pipeline operators industry in England to voluntarily participate in a call-before-you-dig centre that would reduce the risk of damage to underground infrastructure during excavation.  There had been a near major disaster in Birmingham (Hunton Hill) when a gas company crew had attempted what was supposed to be a routine tap into a gas main to connect a new customer.  Three drill bits later, the crew knocked off.  Fortunately an ESSO contractor just happened to pass by and recognized that the gas crew had been attempting to tap into a high pressure fuel line.  At the conference the section of pipe with dimple caused by the gas crew was shown.  A number of experts described the the extent of the disaster that would have followed if the crew had tapped into the line.  The 2003 gas explosion in Belgium would have paled by comparison.  In just the last month in the Americas, there has been an explosion in downtown San Francisco, another one in Durham, North Carolina, one in downtown Sao Paulo, and an evacuation of a neighbourhood in Calgary, Canada when a 6" gas main was ruptured during excavation.

Economic driver: construction productivity

UK construction productivity compared to other sectors

The major problem facing the construction industry in advanced economies is productivity which has plateaued or even declined over the past 40 years. With the growth of private investment in infrastructure, improved productivity has become urgent. McKinsey has made the case that BIM and geospatial are key technologies in transforming construction.  The U.K. has been a leader in the digitalization of the construction industry, mandating that from 2016 all public construction in the U.K. must use a BIM Level 2 process.  The subsurface has been for the most part ignored in the application of digital technology to construction, but there are signs now that this is changing in the U.K., as people recognize the drag on construction projects and the broader national economy that this represents.  Improving the reliability of and sharing location information about the underground can be seen as 'low hanging fruit' in the quest to improve construction productivity. 

Sharing subsurface geotechnical information

One of the problems is that every construction project involves considerable effort to discover subsurface geotechnical conditions and the location of underground infrastructure in the area to be excavated, but a large proportion of the data generated by the UK ground engineering industry is used for one project and not shared.  In the Netherlands the problem is being addressed by the Key Registry for the Subsurface (BRO) which came into force in January, 2018. The BRO registry consists of 26 data types, which will become mandatory in installments over five years and all of which include location. On 1 January 2018,it become mandatory to report the first three data types, geotechnical surveys (CPT), groundwater monitoring wells and soil drilling sample profiles. On 26 June 2018, this data became publicly available via the Dutch open data portal PDOK.

In the UK the Dig to Share project, supported by Atkins, British Geological Survey (BGS) and Morgan Sindall, is addressing this problem. Its aim is to develop a fully digital workflow, which is accessible to the whole industry, to upload and access data from the BGS web-based system. This will be developed on top of the existing system hosted and maintained by BGS. 

I should add that in the domain of geotechnics Keynetix is a UK-based provider of cloud-based software for capturing, visualizing, modeling, and sharing of geotechnical data. Bentley Systems has just announced the acquisition of Keynetix which adds to Bentley's products for the subsurface including borehole report management (gINT) and geotechnical analysis applications (PLAXIS and SoilVision) with which Bentley is targeting enabling a digital twin of the underground. 

Sharing information about the location of underground infrastructure

The Geospatial Commission has just announced its intention to create an Underground Assets Register.  The intention is to show where electricity and telecom cables, and gas and water pipes are buried to help prevent both accidents and disruption to the economy.  The project will start with £3.9 million pilot projects split between London and the North East.

Pipes and cables beneath a road crossing in North East England - Thanks to Holger Kessler for sharing.

Related to this is the North East Underground Infrastructure Hub (NEUIH) , the Ordnance Survey's and Northumbrian Water's project to create a ‘Common Infrastructure Map’ in Newcastle.  The current phase of the initiative is called ‘Sunderland sand box’ and implements a dataset that contains almost full water, gas, electricity and a great deal of telco data for the city of Sunderland.

Collecting underground utility damage statistics

The U.K. has not had access to good statistics on underground utility strikes similar to the Common Ground Alliance in North America.  Since 2014 the Utility Strike Avoidance Group (USAG) has begun collecting statistics on underground utility damage. USAG currently operates on a voluntary basis with no direct funding other than the support offered by member organizations.  Its 2015/2016 report includes over 2700 utility strikes across the UK during 2015 & 16 from 32 participants.  For comparison in the U.S. there were 316,422 incidents of damage to underground infrastructure reported to the Common Ground Alliance in 2017.  According to the Japan Construction Industry Association (Edson Enohi personal communication), in all of Japan in 2016 there were 134 incidents.

One-call centre for England

England does not have legislation mandating a one-call centre as just about every state and province in North America does.  This puts the onus on excavators to track down and contact utilities and others who may have infrastructure in the area of the planned excavation.  To fill the gap a private company LinesearchbeforeUdig (LSBUD) offers something similar to a North American one-call centre. I had the opportunity to chat with Richard Broome, Managing Director of LSBUD.  LSBUD offers a voluntary free to use service which anyone planning excavation can use to check for underground utility assets that LSBUD's 75 members (network operators) have in the area of the planned excavation.

The way this works has some similarities with a North American one-call centre.  The excavator provides details of the planned excavation to an online system.  The system immediately responds with a list of LSBUD members that have assets near where the excavation is planned.  Subsequently each member sends plans of their infrastructure assets in the area of the planned excavation.

LSBUD is owned by Fisher German LLP and PelicanCorp, an Australian company that runs one-call centres in Indiana, Kentucky, Alberta, British Columbia, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, Singapore in addition to the UK. The assets that LSBUD's member manage include hundreds of thousands of kilometers of underground and overhead electricity, gas, high pressure fuel, water and fibre optic pipes and cables.  LSBUD is supported by its members which include all fuel transmission companies, 60-70% of electric power network operators, and some water and telecom operators in England. The benefits that the members derive from LSBUD are improved safety and reduced utility damage costs. The public also benefits from fewer outages.  The LSBUD service processes over 2.5 million inquiries per annum.

There are risks of sharing information for both commercial (competitive) or security purposes. To manage this balance, the Member always controls who accesses their data. Members always controls who accesses their data. Users can get very high level information about a Member’s network through the LSBUD oce call process, but members are in full control of the access rights to their detailed information. They also have a live view of those requesting and receiving their information together with a detailed audit trail.

Much of the liability is on the contractor to locate the assets on site. In terms of the accuracy/ validity of the data, the asset owner carries that themselves with relevant disclaimers. The asset owner determines both the Area of Interest (AOI) on the service, as well as any guidance/literature/disclaimers that are sent with their responses.

Coordinating street works

One area that would directly benefit from shared location information about the subsurface is street works. In 2004 the UK Parliament passed the Traffic Management Act, which gave highway authorities greater power to manage traffic disruption caused by 2.5 million roadworks that take place in England each year.  In particular it requires excavators to apply for a permit (as Bern has done) for road work providing information about the location and timing of the proposed road work.  Late last year the Department for Transport announced an investment of £10 million in Street Manager, a digital planning service that will generate real time data about street construction.  It will be free for technology companies and app developers to use. This will allow services like Waze (whose vision is to eliminate traffic congestion) and startups to build app that help motorists avoid congestion caused by road construction.

The Traffic Management Act also enables local councils to charge a fee for permitting road work.  One way of using this power is referred to as lane rental.  Pilots have been carried out in several location in England and have been found to reduce congestion by half on busy roads.  For this to be used effectively requires accurate locate information about underground utilities and communications infrastructure.

Standard relating to the underground

A process to update the 2014 Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 128, has just been initiated.  PAS 128, developed under the auspices of the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and others, is one of the few that reflects the advances in underground detection technology - hardware and software - that have occurred in the last few years.  That it is now being updated suggests that PAS128 will continue to stay current with the underground detection technology curve.

The Open Geospatial Consortium MUDDI initiative to develop a standard for sharing information about the subsurface, including both geotechnics and underground infrastructure, is supported by the Ordnance Survey and includes several U.K. and INSPIRE standards.

Together these government, private sector and standards initiatives reflect the accelerating recognition in the UK of the importance of sharing information about subsurface geotechnics and infrastructure for public safety and construction productivity.

Reference

* N.M.H. Alhalaby and I.L.Whyte, The impact of ground risks in construction on project finance in Risk and reliability in ground engineering, Edited by B.O.Skipp, Proceedings of the conference organised by the Institution of Civil Engineers, London, 1993.

"A statistical review of projects revealed that 50% of commercial buildings and 37% of industrial buildings experienced delay due to unforeseen ground conditions. Reports from NEDO state that the most frequent origin of overruns and long delays (greater than 10 weeks) are unforeseen obstacles in the ground."

NEDO Faster building for industry. National Economic Development Office London 1983

NEDO Faster building for commerce. National Economic Development Office London 1988

Tracking a construction project in real-time with smartphones

Many see handheld scanning as revolutionizing the construction sector.  The Dot Product handheld scanner and Faro Freestyle introduced in 2013 were among the first multi-sensor devices (IR laser and photo cameras) targeted at professionals, especially in the engineering and construction sector (mm accuracy at 2 m). They employed laser scanning technology similar to the Microsoft Kinetic (2010). For rapid site documentation, Matterport allows you to scan a floor of a building in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later have a fully-rendered 3D walk-through that can be accessed over the web.  It was originally targeted on the real estate sector but recently has been experiencing growing application in the construction industry. The Leica Geosystems BLK360 captures full-color panoramic images overlaid on a high accuracy point cloud (mm accuracy at 60 m). It weighs only about a kilogram. One-button operation means this is almost a consumer device- anyone who can operate an iPad can use the imaging laser scanner. But it is a professional device - it collects 360,000 points per second and has a range of 60 meters with 4 mm accuracy - with a very low but still professional price. Recently I came across a startup called HoloBuilder that only requires a consumer grade 360° camera and a smart phone app to document a construction project working with uploaded floor plans and walking through a job site placing the camera and tripod in the middle of each room to take a series of 360° photos. 

I just came across a product focussed on construction that lowers the bar still further.  Now ordinary smart phones can be used to capture the status of construction work at a very granular level in real-time.  A mobile+cloud application CTBIM created by BuilDATAnalytics enables each subcontractor on a project to document each step of their work with little additional effort.

Design plans are preloaded with all room and interior space locations. All assets associated with each room are in the CTBIM system organized according ot the scope of each trade's contract. For installing doors or windows for example, the height, width, material, partition, thickness, hardware and other specifications are catalogued in CTBIM for for all doors and windows associated with each room. This information is available on a subcontractors smart phone whether there is connectivity or not.

For example, a subcontractor responsible for installing door or window assemblies can simply click on the task on a smart phone and take a picture. This provides a detailed time-stamped (GPS stamped for civil projects) record of each subcontractors progress which can be used for a variety of purposes.  For example, it makes it possible to track construction progress at a very granular level, identify productivity issues that threaten the schedule, and provide documentation that could protect subcontractors if facilities are damaged later in the project.  It also means that the owner or an owner's agent such as a facilities manager can see the design page where the specific window or door assembly appears, the picture of what the door or window looked like at the time of installation, the  manufacturer specification sheet, operations and maintenance manuals, and other documentation relating to each building element. All of this information is recorded in the CTBIM database during construction and for the lifetime of the building or infrastructure.

This enables CTBIM to follow construction progress in near real time with location-specific, real time photographic or videographic evidence of work completed, real-time calculations of percentage of work completed, real time calculations of percentage of budget dollars earned per contractor, real time update on the number of assets required for the project and the number of assets on hand, on demand reports of every asset installed in a structure, the dates of installation, and the ability to drill down to identify the person responsible for the installation activity, room by room comparison of how long a build or installation activity took to complete, and data that can be used use to advise owners of the number of crew members required to accelerate build activities to avoid schedule creep, among other things.  CTBIM is focussed on providing owners actionable insights into the activities of each field crew responsible for some aspect of the build.  Since virtually every subcontractor already has a handheld smartphone, the CTBIM application could dramatically impact subcontractor business processes - improve productivity, remove risk, and provide greater transparency, critical for an industry prone to litigation.

It is really incredible how quickly consumer technology such as Kinetic and mobile handheld devices equipped with sensors, cameras and apps are being adapted for the construction industry.  As earlier users of the Dot Product scanner at Bechtel forecasted, these devices are beginning to revolutionize many aspects of how we do construction.

National underground infrastructure map could deliver £245 million per year to UK

The Geospatial Commission’s Annual Plan 2019/20 describes the activities that it plans to undertake in 2019/2020 to develop the UK’s National Geospatial Strategy.  The first project announced for 2019/2020 is its intention to fund two pilots that would lead to a national rollout of a National Underground Asset Register.

The Geospatial Commission was created in April 2018 as an independent, expert committee in the centre of government. The objective is to create value for the national economy from geospatial data and to further develop the UK’s geospatial expertise for the global market.  The Geospatial Commission issued a Call for Evidence in August 2018 to identify opportunities relating to  geospatial data and technologies.

The Geospatial Commission has sought to identify low hanging fruit, the priority sectors and interventions that will provide value rapidly and where the need for government intervention is clearest. One of first that was identified is the significant value that could be released by accurate and reliable subsurface data by a National Underground Asset Register.  Such a register would lower risk for every construction and infrastructure project, because current practice is hugely inefficient and error prone as the gas explosion in 2004 in Flanders has shown.  Recognizing the risk of asset strikes with attendant danger to life, project delays, cost overruns and disruption to traffic and local economies, over the past year the Geospatial Commission has conducted a research exercise into the business of locating underground utilities.  As a result the Geospatial Commission has just announced that its first 2019/20 project is an investment of £3.9 million into two regional pilots; one led by the Greater London Authority (GLA) in London and the the other led by the Ordnance Survey in the North East of England. The GLA will focus on data conditioning and modelling, and the OS will provide the prototype platform and associated technical design and experience to test the use cases of safer digging and project and data-exchange efficiencies. This has a total estimated value of £245 million per annum. These pilots will be used to determine how to proceed with the tender for a regional build and national rollout of a National Underground Asset Register.  The Geospatial Commission has estimated that a national underground infrastructure map could deliver £245 million per year to the UK economy.

Role of surveyors in digitally mapping underground utilities

Last week I was invited to speak at the Alberta Land Surveyors Association Annual General Meeting in Banff, Alberta about locating and mapping underground infrastructure. I thought it would be worthwhile to share the talk that I gave where I highlighted opportunities for surveyors.

The subsurface is often ignored.  This is partly a case of out-of-sight is out-of-mind. But it is also the result of broken business processes in the construction industry that place much greater value on physical assets than on what is now being called the digital twin representing the location, behaviour and status of underground assets.  Knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the recent explosions in San Francisco and Durham NC and the evacuation just last week of a neighbourhood in Calgary when a 6" gas line was hit during an excavation come to mind.

Impact of unknown and inaccurately located subsurface infrastructure and geotechnics

The best documented example I know of the economic impact of not knowing accurately where underground infrastructure is the Sydney Light Rail Extension Project.  This is a $2.1 billion PPP project for 12 km of light rail to be completed by 2019. Prior to awarding the contract for construction the Department of Transport for New South Wales undertook 12 months of work to map 5,000 subsurface utilities along the route. 500 existing subsurface utilities were identified for relocation to make way for the new light rail infrastructure. During construction it was found that the as-built information from utility providers was frequently unreliable including incorrect location and incorrect materials. The second problem was that during construction an additional 400 unknown services were encountered. As anyone in the construction industry will tell you - discovering unknown underground utility infrastructure occurs frequently on construction projects. Both of these caused disruption and delays with construction. In this case ACIL Allen, a respected Australian consulting firm, was asked to estimate what the impact of unknown and inaccurately located utilities was on the project. Their study concluded that if a complete and reliable 3D map of underground infrastructure had been available at the project planning stage, the project could have been completed at least one and a half years sooner, at less cost with a much lower level of risk. While the project apparently remained ‘on time and on budget’, ACIL Allen says that this is only because the risk of delays and additional costs resulting from unidentified underground utilities were included in the contract pricing and schedule.

An example that shows the benefit of knowing where underground utility infrastructure is located is the I-20/I-59 Corridor project in Alabama.  This is a $750 million interchange project in the heart of Birmingham's business district.  For this project the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) took an unusual approach.  Using potholing, scanning with ground penetrating radar, professional surveyors and existing as-built records a 3D model of below-ground utilities was created.  When the project was put out to tender each contract each bidder was provided with the 3D model.  ALDOT estimated that it saved $10 million on the project with this approach.  Perhaps more importantly the project remains on schedule and on budget - remarkable for a project of this complexity and magnitude in a dense urban environment.

Setting the context: the construction industry is ripe for digitalization

To put this in context there is massive investment in infrastructure projects around the world as evidenced by the US$ 90 billion Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor project in India which will affect some 180 million people.  McKinsey estimates that we will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure over the next decade or so.  But how infrastructure is financed is changing and this is changing the construction industry.  Governments have less and less money for capital projects.  Since 2003 growing amounts of private capital have been going into infrastructure projects.  In 2016 total private investment in infrastructure projects reached nearly $80 billion.  Unlike government which looks for a social return, private investors such as pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds require a financial return.  This drives a focus on improving productivity. As the automobile manufacturing, financial services, airline and other industries have shown this drives investment in IT technology. 

McKinsey has made the case that construction is ripe for transformation and that digitalization will be a key technological driver.  R&D investment in the construction industry has been among the lowest of any industry, ranking nearly last, at the same level as hunting.  Construction productivity in the world's advanced economies including Germany, Japan, UK, EU, US, and South Korea has been stagnant or declining for the past 40 years, a period during which general industrial productivity has more than doubled.  McKinsey has made the case that digitalization could help raise construction productivity and identified five technologies that it believes will be key for transforming the construction industry.  Two of these are building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial.

BIM+geospatial provides the basic technology for modelling underground infrastructure.  BIM involves a 3D model, associated data, and a collaborative approach to construction. BIM has been or is being mandated for public works in many countries and has also been adopted by many private sector companies.  Furthermore there is growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM + geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction, especially for infrastructure projects.  For example, it has been estimated that applying this approach for the Nagpur Metro project will save over $200 million over the 25 year lifetime of the project.  In Canada EllisDon, who began taking on PPP projects 15 years ago, has made integrated BIM+geospatial a best practice for their PPP projects. 

To drive improved financial returns and attract private capital owners and the construction industry are looking for low hanging fruit. Reducing the risk of unknown and inaccurately mapped underground utilities can dramatically reduce costs and duration for construction projects as the Alabama I-20/I-59 Corridor project has shown. 

Key facts about unreliable and incomplete information about subsurface infrastructure

The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) collects statistics regarding damage to underground infrastructure during construction.  The CGA estimates that there are 400,000 cases of utilities being hit during excavation every year at at average cost of $4000 in direct costs per hit. In the U.S. according to Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) underground utility conflicts and relocations are a major cause of project delays during road construction.  In addition every year there are injuries and deaths attributable to hitting underground utilities. 

In the U.K. research by the University if Birmingham has estimated that the direct cost of a utility strike during construction ranges from £ 300 for water and sewer to £ 2,800 for fiber-optic cables.  More importantly the indirect and social cost, which includes traffic disruption, injuries to workers and the public, and loss of business custom was estimated to be about 30X the direct cost.

Every construction project requires investing time and effort prior to and during excavation to locate underground utilities. Construction bids are routinely inflated by 10-30% to accommodate risk associated with unknown or poorly located underground utilities  In the U.S. this has engendered what is estimated to be a $10 billion per year industry. Every state in the U.S. and most provinces in Canada have a one-call centre and legislation that requires anyone planning to excavate to contact the centre.  Utilities and telecoms are required to send crews to locate and indicate with paint or pin flags the location of their underground infrastructure.  Because they are considered liable for any underground damage, wise construction contractors do not rely solely on this information but increasingly use expensive vacuum and hydro excavation equipment in detecting and exposing underground infrastructure during excavation.  But the information captured by these techniques is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again.

Together this represents a considerable drag on the construction industry.  In the U.S. if indirect and social costs are included this represents at least a $50 billion drag on the economy and this does not include insurance costs.  Of this the largest share is borne by the consuming public in the form of service disruption - phone, power, heating and water outages.

Several university studies have estimated the benefit in terms of an ROI of knowing accurately where underground infrastructure is located. One of the most recent by Pennsylvania State University found $21 in cost saving for every dollar invested in improved location information about underground infrastructure.  In the U.S. the Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) cites studies that have shown that the cost of detecting underground utilities prior to construction typically costs less than 0.5 percent of the total project construction cost, saves more than $4 for every $1 spent, and can reduce project delivery time by as much as 20 percent. A study resulting from an underground survey in Milan in preparation for a World Fair there estimated that €16 were saved for every € invested in accurately locating underground infrastructure.

Underground utilities and highway construction

The Alabama I-20/I-59 Corridor project has shown that a 3D map of underground infrastructure can reduce risk and keep highway construction projects on budget and on schedule. As Ron Singh, who was Chief of Surveys at the Oregon DoT, has argued, underground utilities are a huge problem for highway construction projects.  In his view we need to stand the traditional highway construction process on its head.  He explained that this means the traditional approach - survey, design, locate utilities, move utilities, build, and prepare as-builts - needs to be replaced by an approach that relies on a prior 3D model of above and below-ground infrastructure which will provide 85% of the information required about the existing site and situation.  The new process will require a rapid initial survey for sanity checking the information in the 3D model followed by design with knowledge of underground utilities.  This approach would avoid expensive moving of utilities as much as possible and only move utilities that cannot be avoided during design.  During construction underground utilities would be laser-scanned. A post-project 3D survey and laser-scanning would replace paper as-builts.  A side-benefit of this approach is that it would with time build up accurate models of highways which many believe will be essential for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles.

Cost-effectively mapping the underground

The keys to cost-effectively and accurately mapping underground infrastructure are first of all policies and technologies that ensure that the location of new infrastructure going into the ground is captured accurately and cost-effectively,  secondly policies and technologies that require that the location of infrastructure exposed during construction is captures accurately and cost-effectively, and thirdly policies for sharing information about underground infrastructure (essential in the U.S. where this information is restricted under Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) regulations).  These goals will require modernized quality standards for underground infrastructure, standards for sharing underground infrastructure location data, and hardware and software advances for cost-effectively and accurately detecting and recording the location of existing underground infrastructure.  There are important opportunities for professional surveyors in capturing accurately and responsibly the location of new and existing infrastructure.  The challenge will be to develop new business practices and adopt new technologies to be able to do this cost-effectively so as not to significantly increase the cost of construction or burden government with major additional mapping costs.

Technology advances in detecting underground infrastructure

A research project by Costain and Bentley investigated using photogrammetry with photos taken by consumer grade smartphones together with professionally surveyed control points. Typically it involves taking 40-60 pictures of exposed infrastructure with a smartphone. This process has been found to result in a 3D model of comparable accuracy to a traditional survey, is much more cost-efficient and once the control points are surveyed is something that anybody can do. Most importantly it enables the capture of accurate underground utility location during construction with little additional cost.

In a similar vein Bentley Systems has experimented with a system that equips excavation equipment with four inexpensive digital cameras that are used to collect images of underground infrastructure encountered during excavation.  The resulting videos and images were then loaded into Bentley ContextCapture software and exposed pipes and cables located with centimeter accuracy by referencing accurately surveyed neighbouring structures such as houses and other buildings.  Again this approach enables the capture of accurate location data about underground infrastructure location during construction with little added cost.

In 2018 two technical advancements in detection were reported that bring the cost-effective mapping of underground infrastructure at the municipal, regional, and national level closer to reality. T2 Utility Engineers, based in Whitby, Ontario commercially use a IDS GeoRadar Stream EM multi-channel ground penetrating radar (GPR) array towed routinely at 10-12 km/hr to capture subsurface data.  In a separate initiative a successful proof of concept has been reported by DGT Associates in Mississauga, Ontario in which data collected by a Siteco rig combining a Faro mobile laser scanner and Sensors and Software GPR arrays collected data simultaneously above and below ground at roadway speeds of 80 to 90 km/hr. In both cases the data was collected in soil conditions that were less than optimum for GPR. Being able to capture data at or near roadway speeds addresses an important obstacle to efficiently creating 3D maps of the underground. In both cases significant time was required to post-process the collected sc 3D models.  However, advances in software are making this process more reliable and faster.

In another interesting development Lux Modus has developed a rig and software running in the cloud that captures 3D location information in "near real-time" as a pipeline is constructed.  The rig includes LiDAR and photo cameras which capture the trench and the pipeline by driving along each section before the trench is filled to record a point cloud and photos.  The point cloud and images are uploaded for cloud processing and within minutes to hours a digital twin of the pipeline can be viewed by anyone with a browser that supports HTML5 including mobile devices.  For example, this makes it possible for QA/QC people to use mixed reality to identify weld points in the office rather than having to go out in the field.

Satellite sensors are also finding application in detecting damage to underground infrastructure.  Planetek has developed an application Network Alert that uses Sentinel-1's radar interferometry to monitor ground subsidence with millimeter precision.  Network Alert alerts water utilities af areas of subsidence which can be symptoms of water leaks.

There are further indications of accelerating research and development initiatives related to underground infrastructure. In the U.S. for the first time the Common Ground Alliance (CGA), which represents the utility locate industry in North America, has just released a Technology Report, which describes the current state of underground detection technology including the latest developments and the gaps which CGA has identified in current hardware and software.

In the UK there have been quite a few research initiatives relating to underground infrastructure. The Mayor of London and the Smart London Infrastructure Network, which is composed of utilities responsible for water, energy, telecommunications and waste management in London, sponsored a challenge with the objective of developing digital technologies to accurately locate underground assets, including pipes, cables and joints, and determine their condition. The goal was to improve safety, and to reduce operational downtime, cost and environmental impact, and disruption. A national 10 year academic research program Mapping the Underworld focussed on remote-sensing for locating sub-surface utilities is completed and been replaced by a follow-on 10 year program Assessing the Underworld. The BIM for the Subsurface (2015-2017) project, funded by Innovate UK, aimed to address issues such as project delays due to unforeseen ground conditions by applying the BIM process directly to ground investigation and subsurface infrastructure design.

Sharing information about the underground

To complement the advances in detection there are several initiatives to develop ways to share information about underground infrastructure that is captured during construction. The City of Chicago has launched a pilot to deploy a platform for collecting data and creating and sharing a 3D map of underground. It is based on new technology developed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Real-Time and Automated Monitoring and Control Lab (RAAMAC) and Chicago start-up CityZenith. During excavation a dozen or more pictures are captured with an inexpensive digital camera. RAAMAC's software uses the photos to create a 3D digital model of the underground infrastructure. These models can be securely shared between the City of Chicago and construction contractors to improve project planning and limiting accidents. The advantage of this approach to data collection is that it does not interfere with construction and does not add any significant cost.

But perhaps the initiative that everyone interested in improving knowledge of the underground should be following is a national program in the Netherlands which is supported by legislation and standards. In 2015 a new law was passed by the States General which created the Basisregistratie Ondergrond (BRO) or Key Registry for the Subsurface.  This database is open and accessible to all citizens of the Netherlands.  This went live in 2018 and requires that if you excavate or drill you have to share your data relating to geotechnics with the BRO registry. In addition if when using the data in the registry you find something is incorrect you are required to report it.

While the BRO registry in the Netherlands relates to subsurface geotechnics, the Geopatial Commission in the Cabinet Office in the U.K. government has just announced an initiative to create a registry of underground infrastructure assets.  The register will show where electricity and telecom cables, and gas and water pipes are buried and is intended to prevent both accidents and disruption to the economy.  The project will start with £3.9 million pilot projects split between London and the North East.

Worldwide initiatives to map underground infrastructure

There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database. I have blogged about a few shared databases of utility location data (water, sanitary and storm sewers, electric power, telecommunications, gas, and district heating) I've encountered worldwide over the years: Sunderland UK, Netherlands, France, Chicago, Alabama, Singapore, Sydney, Milan, the KLIC system in the Netherlands, KLIP in Belgium, Penang, Sarajevo, Calgary, Edmonton, Jalisco, UK, Japan, Bahrain, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Delhi, Bern, and even an open water network portal in New Zealand. Perhaps the closest to a shared integrated infrastructure database is the one supported by the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) in British Columbia which includes geospatial data for property boundaries, utility and communications networks, taxation jurisdictions, conservation districts, and the agricultural land reserve. Most of the shared infrastructure information initiatives I have come across involve government, some result from regulation, others are run by government, still others involve cooperation between government and participating utilities and communications firms, and a few are voluntary industry consortia.

The grandfather of shared underground infrastructure databases is the system developed many years ago for Tokyo. The mainframe-based Road Administration Information Center (ROADIC) system, which was deployed first in Tokyo and then in other major cities in Japan, provides information about the location of underground infrastructure including telecommunications and utilities.

In North America the City of Calgary, Alberta mandated the JUMP (Joint Utility Mapping Project) many years ago. A city by-law requires that anyone placing cables or pipes undergound within city limits provide 2D maps in electronic form showing the location of the infrastructure. Originally in the form of DGN files the maps only show location and type of infrastructure (water, gas, electric power, telecom) and owner. The City of Edmonton, Alberta also has a shared facilities mapping database.

Las Vegas has conducted a pilot for a 1.5 mile corridor of Main Street in old Las Vegas.  Using a variety of reality capture technologies including GIS, survey, design records, test holes, and ground penetrating radar (GPR) a 3D model of above below-ground infrastructure was prepared.  Las Vegas also attempted to ensure that in the future accurate 3D location of new or displaced infrastructure would be captured.  Contractors were required to use open trenching, to survey new and displaced utilities before closing trenches, and to avoid trenchless digging if possible.  Augmented reality was used to visualize above and below-ground infrastructure.

In France a national regulation requiring mapping of subsurface infrastructure titled Decree relating to excavations near underground, overhead or underwater transmission or distribution networks was promulgated on 15 February 2012. It requires mapping all critical underground infrastructure in urban areas by 2019 and in rural areas by 2026. Across France different departmental organizations have taken responsibility for implementing the decree. 

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) of Singapore intends to release a masterplan of Singapore's subsurface infrastructure in 2019.​ It will be released as part of the next national Master Plan for Singapore's development in the medium term. When completed it will provide the first comprehensive 3D map at what lies beneath the surface from utilities a few meters deep to transportation tunnels, deep sewer lines, deep petrochemical storage, deep water reservoirs and even deep ammunition stores.

The North East Underground Infrastructure Hub (NEUIH) is the overall initiative name for an initiative supported by the Ordnance Survey and Northumbrian Water to map underground infrastructure in the North East of England. The first phase of this project was a ‘Common Infrastructure Map’ covering a few small sample areas around Newcastle.  This combined map is the first step towards creating the NEUIH.  The current phase of the OS initiative is called ‘Sunderland sand box’ and implements a dataset that contains almost full water, gas, electricity and a great deal of telco data for the city of Sunderland.

Standards for underground infrastructure

Recently there have been developments that reflect improvements in underground remote sensing technology. Standards for reporting the reliability of the locational information about underground utilities have been in place for decades. In the U.S. the 2003 ASCE 38-02 which has been used for classifying location information about underground infrastructure according to its estimated reliability, is widely seen as being out of date. In Canada the CSA S250 standard released in 2011 specifies absolute precision levels for exposed utilities. In France the 2012 presidential decree defines three explicit levels of cartographic accuracy for underground structures; A - less than 40 centimeters, B - 40 centimeters to 1.5 meters, and C - greater than 1.5 meters.  In the UK the 2014 Publicly Available Specification PAS128, developed under the auspices of the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and others, not only includes the A,B, C, D quality levels of the U.S. standard, but extends it with explicit precision levels B1 to B4 that reflect the improved capabilities of underground remote sensing technologies such as electromagnetic induction and ground penetrating radar. A process to revise PAS128 to reflect newer technical developments has just been initiated.

For sharing information about underground infrastructure the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) underground information initiative, with the appropriate acronym MUDDI, is intended to provide an open standards-based way to share information about the below ground. The MUDDI project has identified several different broad use cases that the model is intended to support including routine street excavations (EX), emergency response (ER), utility maintenance programs (OM), large scale construction projects (AE), disaster planning and response (DP), and smart cities programs (SC). For each of these, several basic requirements that the model needs to satisfy have been identified. For street excavations the requirement is location of all entities with high horizontal, medium vertical accuracy (2.5D) of underground infrastructure; for large construction projects, detailed 3D geometry of underground infrastructure and detailed 3D geology; for emergency response, interdependencies between different networks; for utility maintenance, network topology and facility location and condition; and for smart cities the ability to monitor and relate streams of data from sensors.

The MUDDI model is intended to build on and be compatible with many existing reference/target models. For infrastructure these include CityGML with Utility Network ADE (Application Domain Extension) , INSPIRE Utility Networks, IMKL (Information model for cable and pipes), BIM-IFC, Land and Infrastructure Conceptual Model (LandInfra), Singapore Underground Geospatial Model, PipelineML, Underground Pipeline Information Management System, CIM (Common Information Model), Multispeak, ESRI Utility Model, and GEOfeature. For geotechnics, the reference/target models are GeoSciML, INSPIRE Geology, GroundwaterML, BGS National Geological Model, EarthResourceML, GeoTOP, SoilEML, IFC Geotechnical Extension, MINnD, and BoreholeIE.

To provide a way for the model to be used by different types of users, the concept of profiles has been introduced. Profiles have been used for other OGC standards and allow for different levels of complexity for different domains and applications. The proposed profiles include asset, excavation, emergency, planning and integration profiles.

National initiatives to map underground infrastructure

In the UK combining above and below-ground information into one national digital twin will allow industry to share business developments and innovation activities.  Project Iceberg is an exploratory project undertaken by the British Geological Survey, Ordnance Survey and the Future Cities Catapult to investigate ways to integrate data and services relating to the underground with other city data. To date two reports Market Research into the Current State of Play and Global Case Studies and Defining the problem space for an integrated data operating system above and below ground have been published and are publicly available.The medium term objective is to take these concepts forward with project partners to develop new digital data demonstrator projects.

In the U.S. to begin to address the challenge of accurately mapping national critical infrastructure the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), Arizona State University (ASU), the American Geographical Society (AGS), and the National Academy of Construction (NAC) convened leaders in public administration, infrastructure development, geography, geospatial, and data integration/open data at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

At Geospatial World Forum 2019 I learned of an initiative in Estonia, one of the most digitalized countries in the world to create a national digital twin of above and below-ground infrastructure.

Wrap-up

In summary unreliable information about the location of underground infrastructure and underground geotechnics costs world economies billions of dollars every year.  Missing or inaccurate information adds risk to every construction project.  In the U.S. locating subsurface infrastructure is a $10 billion per year industry.  The information is rarely shared with the result that this information is recaptured over and over again.  To provide a standard for sharing information about the underground including infrastructure and geotechnics the Open Geospatial Consortium has initiated a standards development effort called MUDDI which is being built on many existing standards.  An important national initiative to share information about the underground has begun in the Netherlands.  The UK government has just initiated the process to create a national registry of underground assets in the U.K.

A number of cities and regions around the world which have already recognized the importance of reliable information about the underground have developed ways of collecting and sharing information about the subsurface.  Recently the awareness about the importance of information about the subsurface has reached the national level.  France has mandated that the location of critical underground infrastructure must be known to within 40 cm.  Recent initiatives in Estonia, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S. are aimed at creating national digital twins including underground infrastructure.

Professional surveyors could have an important role in capturing accurately the location of new and existing infrastructure.  The challenge will be to develop new business practices and adopt new technologies to enable this to be achieved cost-effectively – in the short term it cannot increase the cost of construction or burden government with significant additional mapping costs. In the long term the benefits include reduced risk for construction contractors which will reduce costs especially insurance. It will also provide significant benefits to owners including government by reducing the cost of infrastructure construction and maintenance.