Between the Poles

Distributech Utility University: Smart grid in North America - progress in developing standards

Yesterday at the Distributech Utility University, Erich Gunther, Ron Farquharson, Sandy Bacik, and Christian Perreault gave a very well researched, in-depth overview of the state of smart grid in North America.  Starting from the premise that "the power system will change more in the next 10 years than it has in the past 100 years", Erich Gunther discussed the major drivers for the smart grid,

• increasing population and increasing power demand
• aging infrastructure - transformers, insulating, switch gear are reaching the end of life
• retiring personnel - losing experienced people who know why we did things in the past the way we did

The term "smart grid" is a marketing term that has become overused and covers a wide variety of elements.  The Department of Energy includes seven elements in its definition of what comprises a smart grid

• consumer participation
• distributed generation
• an integrated market including a consumer market
• power quality including fast resolution of outages
• operational efficiency, utilizing assets to full capacity, and real-time situational awareness
• self-healing
• resilient to malicious attack and natural disasters

He mentioned Southern California Edison's vision of the smart grud as enabling it to intelligently connect the utility to its customers, which focusses on the benefit to consumers.

The major inhibitors that Erich sees are slowing down the adoption and deployment if the next generation of the power grid are

• utility culture - utilities are traditionally focussed on safety and reliability, not on innovation
• lack of integration tools - most utilities are characterized by siloed applications, usually proprietary with severely limited interoperability
• lack of standards - product suppliers are not supplying products that are standards compliant
• lack of understanding of what's possible - technology is moving very rapidly and it is hard for utilities to keep the power on and stay on top of the latest technology

One of the major benefits of the focus on smart grid is that it is motivating companies to understand their business processes.  I blogged previously about how Southern California Edison has looked at its distribution design process and found ways to standardize and impriove the efficiency of this process by integrating their ERP application into the design process.  Edison's use cases developed for its SmartConnect program are available here.

Erich spent a lot of time discussing the NIST/SGIP smart grid standards process with which he is intimately involved.  He mentioned NIST's three phase plan, the NIST Smart Grid Framework 2.0, and the fairly recent SGIP Catalog of Standards which has been released to FERC.  He mentioned that in some areas standards are very well developed and in others there has not been as much progress.  He showed a slide showing the state of standards for communications in a smart grid environment.  In some areas such as wide-area networks, control centers and substations, standards are well developed.  In others such as field area networks (FANs) and asset management there are no standards,

The standards adopted into the SGIP Catalog of Standards include

• IEC 61970/61968 - Common Information Model (CIM) for distribution and transmission
• IEC 61850 - common data model and format for substations
• IEC 60870-6 - standard for the exchange of information between controls centers
• IEC 62351 - cyber security standard for the above standards

Erich said that many substation equipment manufacturers especially European based ones like Siemens and Alstom have been manufacturing their equipment to be compliant with 61850 for years.  He also says that work is underway to enable compatibility of 61850,  DNP3 and CIM.

ASCE report on the impact of under-investment in water infrastructure in the US

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has released a second report in the series called Failure to Act.  The first in the series dealt with transportation.  

Drinking water

The ASCE points out that water services in the U.S. are decentralized. There are about 170,000 public drinking-water systems, more than half of which serve fewer than 500 people.  54,000  of the water systens are community owned and provide water to more than 264 million people.  The other 114,000 are non-community water systems, such as those for campgrounds and schools.  

Most of the drinking-water infrastructure, but especially in older cities, is aging.  When water systems fail, people are without water, emergency response is impeded, and there can be damage to other types of essential infrastructure.  In the worst case water shortages may result in unsanitary conditions and public health issues.

Wastewater

According to the ASCE in 2008 there were about 14,780 wastewater treatment facilities and 19,739 sewer systems  About 98 percent of publicly owned treatment systems were municipally owned.  Aging pipes and inadequate capacity (SSOs and CSOs) result in the  discharge of an estimated 900 billion gallons of untreated sewage into surface waters each year.

Capital investment

Acording to the EPA the capital investment required to maintain and upgrade U.S. drinking water and wastewater  treatment systems in 2010 was $91 billion, but only $36 billion of this was funded, resulting in a capital funding gap of $55 billion.  According to the ASCE, if this trends persist, by 2020 the funding gap will be $84 billion.  By 2040 the funding gap will be $144 billion.  With current trends addressing the gap will become increasingly more expensive, and waters will be polluted.

The ASCE report estimates the impact of not addressing the funding gap will have on househilds and businesses and on the national economy.  The major impacts will be

• Water shortages will result in higher rates and major outlays by businesses and households, including expenditures to move to where infrastructure is still reliable; purchasing and installing equipment to conserve water or recycle  water; and increasing reliance on self-supplied  water and wastewater treatment.
• Increased medical costs as a reult of increases in water-borne illnesses.

The estimated expenses to businesses of unreliable water delivery and wastewater treatment is estimated to be $147 billion by 2020, and $59 billion for households. The total impact  of increased costs and reduced income will decrease the standard of living for families by almost $900 per year by 2020.

By 2020, the predicted deficit for sustaining water delivery and wastewater treatment infrastructure will be $84 billion.  In a worst case scenario, the U.S. will lose nearly 700,000 jobs by 2020 and 1.4 million jobs by 2040.  Between now and 2020, the cumulative loss in business sales will be $734 billion and the cumulative loss to the U.S. GDP will be $416 billion.  By 2040, the impact will be $481 billion in lost business sales and $252 billion in lost GDP.

AU: Hungarian State Railways geolocates 1.35 million objects to 5 cm precision in 14 months

One of the major challenges facing companies that are responsible for managing the world's infrastructure networks is data quality.  I have blogged about data quality on multiple occasions (here, here, here and here).  At Autodesk University Peter Barcza, Managing Director of BPMC Ltd., gave a fascinating presentation of how Hungarian State Railways (MAV), with a very tight budget and a legally binding deadline of January 2, 2011, which translated into a tight timeframe of a little over a year, was able to geolocate 1.35 million objects to 5 cm (2 inches) precision.

Data collection and data quality are the critical success factors for most GIS projects. From 50 to 90 percent of resources are often used for data collection and ensuring data quality. A railway is a multi-utility environment and the MAV team had to classify and geolocate 200 different types of equipment including 7800 km of track, bridges, signaling systems, energy supply, overhead power lines, telecommunications, real estate and facilities such as stations, and other non-MÁV objects.  The original paper maps, some of which dating from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were unreliable for a number of reasons and the precision was in the 1.5- to 2-meter range, inadequate for MAV's purposes. Traditional surveying is time-consuming and MAV would have had to hire expensive external resources to conduct the surveying. To address these issues, Peter re-geolocated all of MAV's facilities using an integrated GPS/GIS data collection process designed for a multi-utility environment.

After analyzing various alternatives, the MAV team decided that given the tight budget and the tight timeframe, GPS/GLONASS based data collection was the only feasible strategy. A country wide GNSS RTK system of 54 earth stations (≤2 cm [1σ] horizontal, ≤3 cm [1σ] vertical) meant that the measurement precision was estimated to be within 5 cm (2 inches), which was adequate for MAV's purposes. Data would have to be collected in the field for later processing because of the difficulty in geolocating and collecting attributes of many of the objects. The data collection process was designed to ensure efficient, semi-automatic, data upload to the GIS system.  A reliable country wide GPRS communicatiions network made this approach feasible.  The GIS system was comprised of an Oracle Spatial database, AutoCAD Map 3D Enterprise, and Autodesk Infrastructure Map Server.

Quality systems

The key to the success of the project was the quality systems focussed on design, field data collection ("measurement") and data upload.  Multiple layers of control ensured that all data was reviewed, accepted or revised within eight days of collection.  The first level of control was local teams from seven differenmt departments in six different territoreis reviewed collected data independently.  The field data collector did not partcipate in this review.  A second level of control reviewed data at a national level.

Results

MAV was able to complete the survey of 1.35 million objects by January, 2011.  In the process 20% of the assets were "discovered", meaning that they were previously undocumented by MAV.  The discovered objects included 500 properties (land parcels) that belonged to MAV but about which MAV had no records.  

The work was done entirely by MAV employees which made it much less expensive than if external contractors would have had to have been used.  Overall it is estimated that as a result of using internal resources and a GPS/GLONASS-based approach the project was 16 times more efficient than a traditional survey.  And the project generated a lot of pride among MAV employees who carried out the work because it was such a remarkable achievement from a data collection, management and quality perspective.

£30 billion public private infrastructure fund proposed in the UK

According to the National Infrastructure Plan 2011 HM Government plans to provide £5 billion by 2014-15 while it is hoping to planning to attract £20 billion from private investors.  The Treasury hopes two-thirds of the of the funding will come from the National Association of Pension Funds and the Pension Protection Fund. It is also separately looking for more investment in infrastructure from insurance companies and from China.

The National Infrastructure Plan sets out a new strategy for meeting the infrastructure needs of the UK economy. It is based on a comprehensive cross-sectoral analysis of the UK’s infrastructure networks and identifies over 500 priority infrastructure projects.

Funding

The Government will facilitate the private investment that will finance the majority of the UK’s infrastructure. This includes bringing in new investors into UK infrastructure; introducing new sources of revenue such as tolling; allowing local authorities more flexibility in the way they use local receipts to fund major infrastructure in specific circumstances; and being willing to consider guarantees against specific risks that the market cannot bear.

Cross-sectoral analysis

The cross sectoral analysis shows the UK’s infrastructure performance is beginning to improve in some areas, such as broadband speeds and coverage, and road safety, but that the age of some networks and the dense pattern of urban development in the UK combine to pose challenges. Many power stations are ageing, road congestion is a growing concern, train punctuality in the UK is worse than on the continent and there is a growing airport capacity challenge in the South East of England.

Based on this analysis, the Government has identified a set of goals for improving infrastructure performance,

• improving the performance and environmental impacts of the UK’s transport networks including maintaining the UK as an international aviation hub
• achieving a secure, diverse and reliable energy supply for the UK while reducing the carbon intensity of electricity generation
• increasing broadband speed and coverage, and ensuring adequate spectrum availability for the wireless communications industry
• maintaining the water and sewerage system while reducing its environmental impacts
• mitigating the impacts of flooding and coastal erosion
• moving towards a zero-waste economy through recycling and other measures

Priority projects

Improvements to the national road network,

• two new managed motorway schemes to allow use of the hard shoulder at congested times on the M3 and M6
• improvements to M1/M6 Junction 19, the A14 Kettering Bypass, widening of the A453 and the A45/46 Tollbar End improvement scheme
• smaller projects which will deliver significant improvements on the road network

Improvments in railway infrastructure and commuter links, including

• electrification of the Transpennine railway route from Manchester to Leeds and a rail link between Oxford and Bedford
• enhancement and renewal works to improve stations and rail infrastructure
• improvements to the quality of travel for rail users, including smart ticketing, new carriages, and limiting fare increases

The Government is committing to extra funding for more local transport projects including new low carbon emission buses.

The Government is announcing funding to create up to ten ‘super-connected cities’ across the UK, with 80-100 megabits per second broadband and city-wide high speed mobile connectivity. 

There will be a particular focus on small and medium sized businesses and strategic employment zones to support economic growth. Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff and London will receive support from this fund and a UK-wide competition will identify up to six additional cities to receive funding.

AU: Improving efficiency of distribution and transmission design at Southern California Edison

Debra Brooks and Jennifer Ryan of Southern California Edison (SCE) gave an outstanding presentation at Autodesk University on SCE's vision and approach in standardizing and unifying design processes for distribution and transmission.

SCE is one the largest U.S. electric utilities serving Los Angeles and other cities in a 50,000 square-mile service territory.  It provides power to nearly 14 million people.  SCE is in the forefront of major trends that are transforming the electric power grid worldwide.  In 2010 19.4% of electricity demand was provided by renewable energy.  As of right now about 3,500,000 smart meters have been installed at customer sites as part of SCE's SmartConnect program.

SCE has about 700 distribution and transmission designers and is facing the same aging workforce challenges that other utilities are.  In 2006 realizing that they needed to improve productiivity by bringing consistency and efficiency to distribution and transmission workflows, they began a business process transformation initiative.

Change management

Managing change is not easy in any organization and the larger the organization the harder it is.  SCE has over 15,000 employees in distribution and transmission.  One of the first things they did was remind themselves of their history to prepare for the coming change.  SCE has been in existence for 125 years.  About 1888 the population of Los Angeles reached 100,000 and shortly after that in 1894 the Los Angeles Edison Electric Company was created as an Edison franchise.  I was surprised that SCE was the first utility to have an air polution control system, but this is LA.  SCE generates most of its own power using hydroelectric, nuclear, solar, wind, and cogeneration facilities. 

But they knew that they had to replace aging with new equipment, comply with increasing regulation, invest in new technologies and become more efficient often with a smaller workforce.  SCE's number one focus is safety, but they also had to address increasing customer expectations. They realized that they had to break out of their current siloed systems to integrate engineering design, ERP, dispatch, material ordering to name just a few of their enterprise systems.  When they started this process their different transmission, distribution, substation design groups were using different technologies.

IPSEC

From the beginning the business process transformation relied on analyzing workflows using an IPSEC methodology.  IPSEC stands for Initiate, Plan, Schedule, Execute, and Close.  They also looked at alternative enterprise system architectures including relying on one vendor or an ERP plus bolt-ons approach and decided to adopt the latter. 

Graphical design

They started the graphical design project in 2007 using Autodesk Utility Design (AUD).  In 2010 graphical design was integrated with SAP, in January 2009 the solution was deployed to distribution, and in November 2010 to transmission.

Compatible units

One of the workflows SCE focussed on was compatible units (CUs).  CUs represent the cost of equipment together with the cost of labour to install the equipment.  When combined with a bill of materials (BOM), CUs allow you to generate job estimates.  The compatible uinit workflow involves many systems including design, crew scheduling, materials ordering, and fixed asset accounting.  In the context of an IPSEC workflow, the enterprise systems involved include

• Initiate - Design Manager, ERP (SAP),  Customer Service System
• Plan - Design Manager, Graphical Design (AUD)
• Schedule - Crew scheduling (Clicksoft)
• Execute - Field operations (eMobile)
• Close - Finance (SAP and PowerPlant)

One of the big benefits on an integrated approach is that it eliminates a lot of redundant data entry.  As Jennefer explained, when she was a designer she had to manually list the bill of materials on the design drawing and repeat it, again manually, in the materials ordering system.

Lessons learned

Debra summarized SCE's experience in transforming their business processes especially engineering design.  The things that worked well for them were

• Phased implementation of technology to minimize impact on the users
• Including testing, especially perfromance testing, as part of the project scope
• Getting and retaining stakeholder engagement from the beginning and through the duration of the project

The areas where they felt they could do better were

• Managing utilitzation expectations
• Scope creep for graphical design
• Managing project scope in the context of available resources (people)
• Making sure that the system test environment was a true replica of the production environment

All in all this represents a remarkable business process reengineering achievement, especially for a company the size of SCE.

Structurally deficient bridge database in Google Maps

Transportation for America has put the National Bridge Inventory of 604,474 bridges on line with Google Maps so you can zoom to any area in the U.S. and see which bridges are structurally deficient and the daily traffic on them.  In this example I've zoomed to the bridge where U.S. 101 crosses Hoover St in Los Angeles County.  This bridge is 62 years old, classified as SD and averages over 273,000 cars per day. 

Structurally deficient 

Built 1949 National bridge ID 530612 

273,200 cars per day (avg.) 

Ratings 

• Deck:4 (POOR CONDITION - advanced corrosion, deterioration, cracking or chipping. Also significant erosion of concrete bridge piers)
• Superstructure:7 (GOOD CONDITION - some minor problems)
• Substructure:7 (GOOD CONDITION - some minor problems)

Inspections 

• Inspection frequency: 24 months
• Last inspection: February-2008

Most trips across 69,000 structurally deficient U.S. bridges occur in metropolitan areas

According to the Federal Highway Administration National Bridge Inventory there are 604,474 bridges in the U.S., including those that are part of the National Highway System (NHS) and non-NHS bridges.  Of these 69,223 (11.5%) are classified as "Structurally Deficient" (SD) and 77,410 (12.8%)) as "Functionally Obsolete" (FO). These terms are defined in terms of technical engineering assessments of  the condition of the deck, superstructures, substructures, culverts and retaining walls.  SD means that the bridge requires more frequent monitoring and critical, near-term maintenance, rehabilitation or replacement.  The average age of an American bridge is 42 years (not that far off from the average age of a transformer in a U.S. substation.)

Transportation for America conducted an analysis of the National Bridge Inventory and found that structurally deficient bridges in metropolitan areas carry three-quarters of all traffic crossing a deficient bridge each day.  210 million trips are taken daily across deficient bridges in these metro regions.  The worst metropolitan area for structurally deficient bridges is Pittsburgh with 30 percent of its bridges rated deficient.  California has the busiest deficient bridges led by Los Angeles.

According to the FHWA’s 2009 statistics, $70.9 billion is needed to upgrade America's deficient bridges.  The actual funds allocated in 2009 was a little over 7% of what was required.

Transportation for America recommends that a fundamental shift in policy is required to ensure that existing infrastructure is maintained at an adequate level.  One of the problems is coordination between different levels of government.  According to federal law, federal funds for bridge repair are allocated to the states and decisions concerning the use of federal funding reside with the states.  But while many major bridges are owned by state departments of transportation (DoTs), some are owned by city or county governments. Transporation for America suggests that better coordination between different levels of government is necessary to ensure that additional funding is prioritized for the most critical repairs, upgrades and replacements.

GITA Japan: Critical Infrastructure

Last week I had the opportunity to present at GITA Japan's 19th annual conference, held this year at Tokyu University. I found it very well attended both vendors and service providers and utility and telecommunications companies.  There were some very thought provoking presentations by international as well as Japanese speakers.

Introduction - Professor Sakura Shinoaki

Professor Shinoaki is well-known in Japan and in GITA because he was instrumental in designing the Road Administration Information Center (ROADIC)  system which was deployed first in Tokyo and then in most major cities in Japan.  I visited the ROADIC site in Tokyo several years ago and GITA sponsored a ROADIC Study Mission in 2003. 

Thanks to the ROADIC system Tokyo in one of the few places in the world where there is a single location where you can find accurate maps of all outside infrastructure including telecommunications and utilities, and in what I would call 2.5D.   The other cities I am aware of are Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta, and Sarajevo, Bosnia, where until recently the location of all utilities was recorded on paper maps.  This has been done for the past 40 years.  In the UK the Traffic Management Act, which received Royal Assent two years ago, but has only been implemented in April of this year, is a first step toward achieving a similar capability on a national scale.

The business benefits of a single site mapping all utilities and telecom infrastructure, for example, for  call-before-you-dig services, are so compelling that I continue to be surprised that every jurisdiction has not mandated this.  But I think that when you consider the additional benefits in a disaster situation such as Ike or Katrina in the US or the 2007 floods in the UK, I really think it is just a matter of time.

The Importance of Infrastructure Interdependencies - Bob Samborski

In 2004 GITA responded to Federal Government initiatives by beginning what became GITA's Geospatially Enabling Community Collaboration (GECCo) to enhance a coordinated response to emergencies using geospatial data.  Bob Samborski and Dave DiSera has been instrumental in this initiative and their presentations focussed on issues relating to critical infrastructure protection.

Perhaps the most startling slides that Bob showed  was the size of the challenge in the US.  The sheer numbers of facilities is staggering. 

One of the very persuasive examples of the interdependence of critical infrastructure is the Baltimore Howard Street Tunnel train derailment.  The derailment caused a fire, which lead to a water main fracture, which resulted in a flood, which led to a power outage which affected 100 000 people.  As well a fibre optic cable running through the tunnel was destroyed, and train services was disrupted for a significant period of time with the result that coal could not be delivered to a thermal power plant, ...

The Geospatial Dimensions of Critical Infrastructure - Dave DiSera

Dave discussed how proximity is an important factor in the interdependence of critical infrastructure and gave as one example a high voltage power line, a gas pipeline, and a waterway all within close proximity so that a major problem with the pipeline, for example, would most certainly impact power transmission and thereby a large number of people, as well as a significant transporation artery.

He also discussed models that have been developed for critical infrastructure interdependence by a number of organizations, but singled out those developed by Idaho National Lab, Argonne National lab, the Government of Canada, and Las Alamos National Lab.

An Overview of the Victorian Government Spatial Strategy...Initiatives and Issues - Neil Smith

Neil Smith is with the Department of Transportation of the Victorian Government.  I have blogged previously about the industry leading initiatives in the area of spatial data sharing by the Victorian Government.  Neil provided insight into the organizational structure of the Victorian Government that have enabled these initiatives to happen.  But the thing that Neil talked about that really rang a bell with me is how pervasive data redundancy is within governments, indeed organizations, everywhere.  The concepts of a single point of truth and custodianship appear to be the central foundation on which Victorian Government is attempting to do to address the problem of data redundancy.

Geographical Survey Institute - Yamato Tanaka

One of the interesting presentation in Japanese that I only partly understood was by Yamato Tanaka who talked about an initiative at the Federal government level to create a shared database that integrates geospatial data from all levels of data including Prefectural and Municipal.  From what I understood tallking to people in local government is Japan, one of the challenges is how this effort is going to be funded, by the Federal government or my local government.  It struck me that there are there are analogies with the attempt by DHS to create and implement a common data model GDM for sharing geospatial data at the state and local level in the US.

Crumbling Infrastructure

I've blogged several times about crumbling infrastructure in North America and the score card prepared by the American Society of Civil Engineers assessing the state of US infrastructure.  I mentioned this during my presentation in Japan and I was surprised to learn that there is a similar effort going on in Japan.  I say surprised, because Japanese infrastructure, at least what I have seen of Japanese streets, roads, and highways, and electric infrastructure, appears to be so much better maintained that what we are famliiar with in much of North America, both in the US and Canada.

UMPC for utilities

Finally, I'll mention that I have been interested in UMPCs for several years.  I have carried an OQO around with me for several years.  I've blogged about UMPCs and have encouraged utilities and telecommunications firms that I meet with to take a look at them.  At least two vendors at GITA Japan were showing mobile applications running on handheld devices.  The one I looked at was running on a Fujitsu U810 with a 5.6" screen, 40 GB h/d and running Vista.  Quite an impressive small device for about C$1200 which is about US$1000 these days, much cheaper than Panasonic Toughbooks, the standard mobile device for many utilities, that cost 4X to 6X times more.

Worldwide Challenges Facing the Construction Industry

There are some very serious challenges facing the construction industry that are motivating new approaches to how we design, build, operate, and maintain buildings and infrastructure.  While these new technologies are designed to address challenges in the construction industry, I think that they are going to profoundly affect other sectors such as operations and maintenance, emergency planning, first response and urban planning.  In this first blog on this subject I am only going to outline what some of the major challenges are. 

Construction Industry

Just to give you some feel for why the construction industry is so important as a market, the annual construction spend is estimated to be $2.3 trillion of which $1.2 trillion was spent in the US alone in 2006/2007 US Annual Construction Spend. 

Challenges Facing the Construction Industry

There are several important challenges facing the construction industry that are motivating the adoption of new technologies such as 3D rendering and simulation, model-driven design including building information modeling (BIM), standards for interoperability for example LandXML.org, International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI), and  Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.

Global Climate Change

The share of Americans calling global warming the most important environmental issue rose from 11 percent in 2003 to 35 percent in 2006 Global Warming Survey.  In the United States alone, buildings account for 39% of total energy use, 68% of total electricity consumption, and 38% of total carbon dioxide emissions Green Building.  The construction industry is faced with the challenge to replace or renovate buildings to minimize environmental impact, for example, achieving carbon neutrality,  while at the same time yielding a respectable financial return on investment.  Some people are calling for reducing fossil fuel consumption of buildings by 50 percent by the year 2010 with a goal of achieving carbon-neutral buildings by 2030 News.  This requires new approaches to designing new buildings and renovating existing buildings.   For example, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System LEED, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction. Since its inception in 1998 and as of July 2007, LEED  is now incorporated in 14,000 projects in 50 US States and 30 countries covering 1.062 billion square feet of development area (July 2007 USGBC figures).

Aging infrastructure

Aging infrastructure is expected to be an increasing prominent issue in many parts of the world.  Every two years the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) prepares a Report Card for American Infrastructure 2003 2005.  One of the sectors the ACSE evaluates is roads, highways, and transit.  In 2003 the ACSE awarded this sector a grade of D+ and in 2005 a grade of D, which translated means just barely passing.  To put this in context, the ASCE estimates that traffic congestion costs the US economy $67.5 billion annually in lost productivity and wasted fuel.  Even more seriously, the Federal Highway Administration (FHwA) reports that outdated and substandard road and bridge design, pavement conditions, and safety features are factors in 30% of all fatal highway accidents.  In the US on average, there are more than 43,000 fatalities every year.  The ASCE also reports that motor vehicle crashes cost U.S. citizens $230 billion per year, or $819 for each resident for medical costs; lost productivity; travel delay; and workplace, insurance and legal costs.

The  ASCE estimates that an investment of $1.6 trillion over five years is required  to bring US infrastructure to good condition.

Shrinking workforce

Statistics Canada predicts that in Canada by 2016 there will no longer be enough new workers to replace retirees.  In the US a Conference Board study Managing the Mature Workforce predicts that by 2010, the number of workers aged 35 to 44 will decline by 19%; aged 45 to 54 will increase 21%; and aged 55 to 64 will increase 52%.  This is a world-wide phenomenon.  The number of workers aged 35 to 44 is expected to decline by 27% in Germany, 19% in the U.K., 9% in Italy, 10% in Japan, and by 8% in China.  A recent study from the American Public Power Association (APPA) Work Force Planning for the Public Power Utilities: Ensuring Resources to Meet Projected Needs reports that the loss of critical knowledge and the inability to find replacements with utility-specific skills are the two biggest challenges facing the industry.   In the utility industry the average age of utility workers is close to 50 and by 2010, as many as 60 percent of today’s experienced utility workers will retire. A survey conducted in 2005 by the Carnegie Mellon University Electricity Industry Center found that human resources executives in the utility sector overwhelmingly listed the aging work force as their number one concern.

In the construction industry a report prepared in 2004 by the U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (ETA) entitled America’s Construction Industry:Identifying and Addressing Workforce Challenges Report of Findings and Recommendations For The President’s High Growth Job Training Initiative in the Construction Industry reported that “industry leaders noted that the construction industry is experiencing a shortage of workers. This current shortage is complicated by two trends: the growth of the industry, and the retirement of the “baby boomers.”  The ETA projects that the construction industry will grow at an average annual rate of 1.3 percent between 2002 and 2012, adding over one million new jobs.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of jobs in construction will increase by 800,000 in the next ten years from 2004 (6,964,500) to 2014 (7,756,900.)  The shrinking workforce problem affects utilities as well as the construction industry.  According to the BLS the overall number of jobs in utilities is projected to be roughly stable over the next ten years 2004 (570,000) to 2014 (562,500) which implies that most new employment will be replacement as more experienced workers retire.

Declining Productivity

The construction industry is highly competitive, and firms must continually improve their productivity to remain competitive.  This challenge of continual productivity improvement has reached crisis proportions in the US where statistics published by US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the productivity of the construction industry has actually declined in the last 40 years while non-farm productivity has increased by over 200% in the same period, see Paul Teicholz.

Islands of Information

The traditional facility lifecycle involves planning, designing, construction, operations and maintenance, and decommissioning.  Facilities include buildings, highways and roads, network infrastructure such as telecommunications, power, water, wastewater, and gas networks.  There are many different disciplines with discipline-specific software applications that are required to build and maintain a building or a network.   For example, in the case of a building, disciplines involved include land developers, architects, heating and ventilation specialists, plumbers, telephone companies and utilities, and road departments of local governments to name a few.  The software applications they use include architectural design, structural engineering, civil engineering, land development, geospatial, and surveying applications. Traditionally each discipline has been isolated from the other and each has maintained its own island of technology or silo of design and engineering information.  However, the facility lifecycle, whether we are talking about a building or a telecommunications network, is being compressed.  In addition organizations especially owners and operators are concerned about the costs of operating and maintaining facilities, which over the lifetime of the facility as a rule of thumb are 90% of the total cost of the facility.

Disciplines such as architecture, structural engineering, construction, civil engineering, and GIS are classic information silos.  Each maintains its own information island comprised of design applications and data.  This has created a nightmare for operations and maintenance, emergency planners and responders, urban planners, and others who require seamless access to urban terrain including building interiors and exteriors, roads and highways, and above ground and underground utilities.  The biggest challenge is not typically data, because the data that would help these folks already exists because much if it is created when buildings and infrastructure were designed.  The biggest challenge is that islands of information and technology make it difficult to integrate existing data in a seamless view. For example emergency responders need immediate and seamless access to information about the building where an emergency is occurring, including interior, surrounding buildings and access roads, and telecommunications and utilities, aerial as well as underground.  At the present time they would need to have been trained in many applications from a multitude of vendors to be able to access all of the different design and geospatial files that would help them deal with an emergency.

As a concrete example, all of the world’s utilities and telecommunications firms manage infrastructure in essentially the same way and are facing similar challenges.  In analyzing  the information flow in these organizations, the most striking problem is islands of information.  The engineering group uses CAD applications, construction uses large format paper, the records or network documentation group may use GIS tools, and operations uses paper or a handheld viewer.  The information flow between these groups is more often than not paper.  The result is a very inefficient process characterized by data redundancy, redundant processes, and poor data quality.

Several years ago the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) commissioned a study  on Interoperability to attempt to quantify the efficiency losses in the U.S. capital facilities industry resulting from inadequate interoperability including design, engineering, facilities management, and business processes software systems and redundant paper records management across the entire facility life-cycle.   NIST estimated that in 2002 poor interoperability cost the US capital facilities industry $15.8 billion.  In addition additional significant inefficiency and lost opportunity costs associated with interoperability problems were identified that were beyond the scope of the NIST analysis which suggested to NIST that the $15.8 billion cost estimate developed in the study is likely to be a conservative figure.  The NIST estimated that two-thirds of these costs are borne by owners and operators, predominantly during ongoing facility operation and maintenance.