Between the Poles

New digital "as-installed" standard for underground and above-ground utility infrastructure

Since 2002 there has been a standard, ASCE 38, for investigating and documenting existing underground utility infrastructure.  Now in the US a new standard ASCE 75 is imminent that will define a standard way to record and exchange information about newly installed infrastructure. This means that in the future all underground infrastructure can be assigned a quality level, either under ASCE 38 or ASCE 75.

Developed by the ASCE Construction Institute (CI) and Utility Engineering and Survey Institute (UESI) the new "as-installed" standard is currently available for public comment through January 6, 2022. It has already been adopted in Montana and Colorado as the "as-constructed" standard for new infrastructure in state right of ways. Recently UESI and the Centre for Advancement of Trenchless Technologies sponsored a talk by Phil Meis, one of the authors of the ASCE 75 standard.

ASCE 75 is applicable to newly installed, repaired, relocated and exposed infrastructure, both below and above ground.  The standard specifies the minimum spatial, 3D geometry, and feature attribute data to be captured for newly installed utilities. Unlike ASCE 38-02 it defines quantitative levels of positional accuracy - for both horizontal and vertical dimensions. It defines a basic set of data that provides a foundation for utility engineering and coordination, network asset management, and the exchange of utility facility information among stakeholders.

Most importantly ASCE 75 is a digital standard, which means that it is consistent with and supports digital construction design standards and delivery practices such as building information modeling (BIM) and virtual design and construction (VDC).

What does it mean for the public right of way owner ?

It makes it possible for the public right of way owner, typically a state Department of Transportation and their designers and contractors, to require advanced 3D digital technologies such as BIM, conflict detection, and reality capture for improved utility coordination with 3rd parties including utility owners. The major benefit is reduced construction risk, time, and costs, and more on-time project completions.

What does it mean for the utility owner ?

For utility owners the benefits of the new standard dwarf the incremental cost.  Standardized recording and retrieval of utility infrastructure data and the ability to exchange information about underground and above-ground utilities among stakeholders provides for enhanced damage prevention and reduced risk to existing utility infrastructure  As a digital standard It enables for more focused and effective utility investigations and conflict assessments. In general it will provide a foundation for more effective utility asset management and more resilient and sustainable infrastructure.

Estonia developing a national digital twin to increase construction productivity

Estonia is well known as one of the most digital countries in Europe.  At the GEOBIM 2020 conference this morning Christopher-Robin Raitviir, of the Estonian Department of Digital Construction in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, described how Estonia is adopting a BIM-based building permit process which is contributing to the development of a  national 3D digital twin.  The business objective behind these initiatives is to improve construction productivity by a factor of three.

The objective of the digital permitting process is to speed up permitting and raise the level of compliance enforced by the process. The digital permitting application accepts BIM models in IFC format and then applies rule-based and algorithm-based checks to ensure compliance with national standards.  For example, a standard for door size can be checked automatically and any doors that are not compliant are highlighted in red and identified and visualized in the 3D model making it easy to identify and correct problematic doors.  After permitting approval building designs are deposited in the National Building Registry.  This is interesting because it addresses a widespread problem; what to do with designs after the permit has been issued.  The designs have been submitted as part of a building permit application and have been publicly available for a period of time.  They contain important information that can be very useful for emergency responders and for other purposes.  The designs are often left to molder away in the basements of municipal governments because of uncertainty about ownership - even though the designs have been publicly available during the permitting process, access after permitting is often restricted because the information is considered to be proprietary.  Currently the models in the National Building Registry are designs, but the ultimate goal is for it to contain accurate as-builts.

The Estonian National Digital Twin was initiated in 2018 and includes buildings, roads and other transportation infrastructure such as rail and airports, and, remarkably, underground utility networks.  This data is publicly available and buildings, transportation links and utility networks can be selected for download in CityGML and other formats.

This is a remarkable initiative on a national scale and is similar in many ways to Singapore which has had a sustained effort to improve the speed and comprehensiveness of the permitting process by requiring digital BIM models.

Automating scan-to-BIM for brownfield substations

With about 55,000 substations in the U.S. and the average age of the transformers in these substations over 40 years old, many substations are going to be refurbished, retrofitted, extended or upgraded. Utilities are opting to create digital twins of their existing substations as part of this process to enable maintenance and upgrading activities to be performed more efficiently. For older substations records may consist in outdated 2D paper drawings or documents may be missing altogether.  New digital scanning technology together with machine learning is making it possible to semi-automate the process of creating intelligent BIM models from point clouds derived from laser scanning or photography.

primtech is a CAD-based design tool for designing high voltage substations.  An important recent enhancement Optical Symbol Recognition (OSR) allows point clouds from laser scanning or photography to be imported and then to apply machine learning to semi-automate the process of creating an intelligent BIM model. 

The software includes an extensive library, which contains more than four thousand intelligent 2D and 3D electrical devices from different manufacturers, steel structures, foundations, and wires and tubes.  The library has been growing for over 15 years and includes new equipment and elements as well as for legacy assets.  Each symbol (device, steel or foundation, etc.) has a specific geometric signature in the database in addition to meta data, file links, connection points and defined object behaviours. Together these comprise smart objects that enables objects in point clouds to be recognized and converted into an intelligent substation information model. The resulting intelligent model provides the basis for the calculations required in the substation engineering process.

The OSR process consists of two phases; first conductors are created and then equipment is added. A wire can be created by simply selecting three points, first anchor point, maximum sag point and end anchor point. For tubes, two or more points can be selected. Wires and tubes are available in the library for different conductor types according to international standards.  After conductors has been created and placed, the OSR tool provides a list of compatible library symbols for each symbol type. It is up to the user to choose which symbol should be selected. The user can select the perfect matching symbol or another one in the list. A similar workflow applies to all the other symbols like support structures and foundation heads. The system then combines the symbols to create assemblies (electrical device, support structure, foundation head) and places them in the model. Once an assembly has been created, the OSR tool will recognize identical assemblies in the point cloud and propose it for those positions in the substation. The wires are automatically attached to the respective electrical connection points on the equipment upon the insertion of the assemblies.  After the OSR tool has examined all objects in the point cloud and they have been mapped to an assembly in the model, a logical and intelligent primtech BIM model has been created. The model can be used as a full-fledged template for extension or retrofit - to create parts lists and plans as well as to carry out calculations including phase checking, clearance calculation, lightning protection calculation, sag and short-circuit effects calculations.

The new OSR technology is not fully automatic but drastically improves efficiency and reliability of converting point clouds into intelligent 3D models.This is an important advance that could dramatically improve the process of scanning brownfield substations to intelligent models by making the process more efficient and less error-prone.

M. Kokorus, F. Pizarro, W. Eyrich and S. Heuser, "From Optical Symbol Recognition (OSR) of Point Clouds to the Substation Information Model," 2018 IEEE/PES Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition (T&D), Denver, CO, USA, pp. 1-4., 16-19 April, 2018

Integrating 3D models and GIS for underground asset management

I had the opportunity to attend the 1Spatial Smarter Data Smarter World conference in London.  A presentation by Seb Lessware, CTO of 1Spatial, of Realworld 4D for BIM and facilities management demonstrated an impressive integration of large volumes of 3D scanned underground data with traditional GIS data streamed across the web for asset management of underground pipe networks.

Earlier this year 1Spatial announced the acquisition of GEOMAP-IMAGIS a geospatial software solutions provider in the areas of utilities/telecom and facilities management, transportation and other sectors. One of GEOMAP-IMAGIS applications is Realworld4D which enables the integration of 3D models including point clouds and meshes from LiDAR scans, BIM models, and high resolution photographic imagery with traditional 2D GIS data.  The application enables streaming access to anyone with a laptop and internet access.

Seb demonstrated an example of a sewer system and showed on a single screen a 2D map of a small part of a city and its sewer system on the left side of the screen, and on the right a 3D mesh derived from a LiDAR scan and high resolution imagery from a photographic record of the same area. The applications makes it possible to simulate walking down the sewer line and follow your progress in all three views. The application also showed the direction of the flow of water.  Seb also demonstrated accurately measuring distances between objects in the sewer line. 

The total volume of data that this represents for all of the city would be calculated in the terabytes.  But users can access small parts of the city infrastructure model without opening the whole model. Seb demonstrated this on a standard notebook with an internet connection showing that this application enables streaming access to huge volumes of data. The application includes a live link to GIS data stored in a traditional GIS and MongoDB for the scanned data.

Furthermore, the application enables showing above-ground and below-ground simultaneously together in a "long profile" view together with a 2D GIS map of a section of the facility. For gravity-fed sewer lines this makes it possible to see the slope in the sewer line and the direction of flow. Clicking on a location on the 2D GIS map instantly shows what the underground and above ground look like along a section of the network.

This was a very impressive integration of 3D scanned data with traditional GIS data to enable streaming access to large volumes of data to anyone with a notebook and internet access. It has application to facilities and asset management of any underground pipe network that can be scanned including gas, water, and wastewater mains. I can also imagine this being to enable creating a network model for underground pipelines from scanned data. 

Seb reported that benefits of this approach are significant.  However, it does require a substantial up-front investment to scan the network, but it is not necessary to capture the entire network before realizing benefits.  Furthermore keeping the scanned data up-to-date does not require recapturing the entire the network.  Only those sections that are changing rapidly or that are of high consequence need to be rescanned.

First substation built using full life-cycle BIM construction goes live one month early

Hubei Electric Engineering Corporation (HEEC) was this year's winner of the Bentley Year in Infrastructure Communications and Utilities award.  One of the key objectives of the ground-breaking CNY 120 million (US$16.8 million) Miluo Western 220kV substation project was to reuse the design BIM model and data during construction and to provide a virtual reality BIM model to the owner on completion of the project to improve operations and maintenance procedures. As a result of the application of digital technology including reality modeling using UAVs, full life-cycle building information modeling (BIM), integrated BIM and geospatial, construction monitoring, and construction simulation, construction was completed 30 days ahead of schedule saving CNY 6.3 million (US$ 895,000).

Hubei Electric Engineering Corporation (HEEC) began applying 3D design to projects beginning in 2013. In 2017 the State Grid Corp began to promote 3D design and held a competition to select the best design companies to carry out 3D demonstration projects. HEEC came in first in this competition and was awarded the Miluo Western 220kV substation project. In addition 3D design standards for China's electric power industry had been developed and HEEC was a leading contributor to six of these standards. On this project HEEC strictly implemented these standards during design.

The Miluo Western 220kV substation supplies power to 160,000 customers in a 16 km² area. The total investment in the 10 month project was CNY 120 million ($16.8 million).

Digital technology including reality modeling using UAVs, building information modeling (BIM), integrated BIM+geospatial, construction monitoring, and construction simulation, enabled collaboration between site preparation, mechanical design, electrical design, protection, and communications design teams.  The challenges that HEEC targeted on this project were several.

First of all, the site was constricted because of existing houses and a key objective was to minimize impact on the existing buildings. By scanning the area and using geospatial reality modeling techniques, the area occupied by the substation was reduced by 22% saving CNY 2.5 million and avoiding the demolition of six houses.

Secondly, the project was the first to apply the 3D standards mandated for the entire Chinese utility industry. The Miluo Western 220kV substation is among the first batch of 3D demonstration projects based on 3D standards.  This is the first of the 3D demonstration projects to go into operation, in June 2019.

Third, because the site chosen for the substation was constricted, cables and equipment were closed together than in other substations. HEEC reengineered the design process and developed a series of system processes to ensure the quality of 3D design by collaborative design between mechanical, electrical, protection, communication, and site preparation teams. During design, clash detection between these different elements avoided 30 instances of rework during construction saving CNY 800,000.

Fourthly, from the beginning the objective was to find a way to reuse the design BIM model during construction. Typically a separate BIM model is developed by construction contractors to be used during construction. HEEC investigated ways that 3D pdfs, mobile handhelds, cloud storage, and other technologies could be used to enable the 3D design BIM to be used to schedule construction.

Fifth, HEEC used reality capture techniques including UAVs to monitor construction progress on a daily basis. Due to uncertain factors factors in the construction process, there will necessarily be deviations between planned and actual construction. By monitoring these on a daily basis ensured that these do not hold up the project. At YII2019 HEEC showed an amazing video with actual and planned construction side by side where each frame represented a day.

Finally, an important goal was to use digital technology to improve operations and maintenance procedures. At the end of the project HEEC was able to hand over to the State Grid a virtual reality BIM+geospatial model designed to improve operations and maintenance procedures.

In summary digital technology including reality capture, construction simulation, and full-lifecycle BIM resulted in tangible benefits; avoiding the demolition of 6 houses and reducing the area required for the substation by 22% for a saving of CNY 2.5 million; significant savings in materials saving CNY 210,000; avoided rework saving CNY 800,000; reducing design time by 65 days; and completing construction 30 days ahead of schedule generating economic benefits of CNY 1.5 million. Taken together the total investment was reduced by CNY 6.3 million (US$ 895,000). In addition by providing a virtual reality model to the owner on completion of the project it is expected that substantive savings will be achieved during operations and maintenance.

Mapping underground utilities prior to design helps highway construction project complete on schedule and below budget

The winner of the Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2019 Roads and Highways award is a remarkable project by Foth Infrastructure and Environment LLC for a $38.9 million highway revitalization project in Cedar Falls, Iowa. This project was unique for several reasons. First of all, before design, a 3D model of all underground infrastructure in the right-of-way was created. This was an important factor enabling the project to complete on-time and 3% under budget. Secondly, Foth projected that innovative design including roundabouts would save the community $32 million over 25 years by reducing the number of accidents, decreasing travel time, lowering fuel usage and emissions, increasing property values, and leading to greater economic growth.

University Avenue was an Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) six-lane, divided highway which the City of Cedar Falls took ownership of in 2014. Built over 60 years ago, the corridor carries 20,000 vehicles per day and was suffering from deteriorated pavement, a crash rate 20% above the state average, a lack of pedestrian and bicycle accommodations, a pedestrian death, and inefficient traffic operations.

Innovative, advanced traffic designs were developed; multi-lane roundabouts, a dogbone interchange, and complete streets – which allowed for a reduction of lanes that still decreased congestion and increased overall traffic flow. Technical innovations included use of drone and mobile scanning utilized for reality modelling, a building information (BIM) for creating 3D modles and fostering collaboration, and 3D visualization and traffic modelling for communicating alternative designs to stakeholders and public.

The project is one of the few of which I am aware in which a 3D model of underground utilities was developed before the start of the design phase. This enabled the detection of 200 utility conflicts during the design phase avoiding utility conflicts during construction and was the primary reason that the project completed on schedule and 3% under bid saving the City $700,000.

The project is also unique in that the design and build contractor estimated the benefits of the proposed innovative design using roundabouts over the 25 year lifetime.  It was projected that the community would recognize $32 million of benefits from fewer accidents, faster travel times, less gas consumption and associated emissions, growing property values, and increasing economic growth.

From a public safety perspective, Foth estimated an 89% reduction in personal injury accidents. As owner of the highway, the City is projected to realize $27 million in benefits from economic growth, corridor improvements, avoided traffic signal maintenance, and reduced lighting costs. Reality modeling including mapping underground utilities prior to design,  innovative highway design, and digital design technology based on BIM saved $521 thousand in project costs by eliminating utility conflicts and the resulting change orders, enhanced public engagement, and design acceleration.

Remarkably, despite facing aggressive schedules, vast information coordination, complex utility coordination, intense public involvement, and a very tight design schedule involving public participation, Foth was able to deliver the project on time and below budget.

Open source geospatial technology enables cost-effective solutions in many domains

At the GITA Pipeline Forum in Houston, an enthralling presentation by Rich Henry of Pivvot, a recent startup that builds solutions for pipeline routing and other applications, highlighted how open source geospatial technology is transforming applications in a variety of sectors. Pivvot builds SaaS solutions using open-source components on Google Maps and Amazon Web Services to provide a web-based cloud computing platform with a curated database from over 900 public and private sources.  The advantages of this approach for siting pipeline routes are dramatic; applying infinite computing resources, completely avoiding the arcane art of managing ESRI ArcGIS licences, and integrating hundreds of data layers making it possible to run alternative pipeline right of way scenarios in hours rather than weeks or months.

Recent technical advances have made it possible to implement cost-effective solutions for utility, telecom and pipeline asset management, integrating BIM and geospatial, and geospatially-enabled machine learning.  Standards are a key underpinning in the development of geospatial applications for a number of vertical industries.  There are now many widely adopted geospatial standards; WMS, WFS, GML, KML, InfraGML, PipelineML, WaterML to name just a few from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) that were not available two decades ago.  Furthermore, open source geospatial developers like open standards.  Many open source libraries and applications implement standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), W3C and GeoJSON. Since 1999 there has been rapid development of open source geospatial projects including MapServer, GDAL, PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, Leaflet, QGIS and others.  The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) was founded in in 2006 and the open source code-base has enabled entrepreneurs to rapidly develop low cost geospatial applications because the cost of maintaining most of the code is shared across a broad developer community.  I'll describe a few of the solutions built on open source components that I have encountered in the last few years.

Records management for utilities

One of the challenges faced by large utilities with multiple GIS, outage management, customer information and other systems, which are often the result of mergers, is how to make spatial and associated data, in different, often incompatible systems, accessible to all users not just GIS professionals.  At Distributech 2018 I discovered how Duke Energy is running an off-the-shelf web-based product based on open source components that is being used by 8000 users, 2000 of them using it 24/7 every day, to access GIS and associated data in several GIS systems, both online and offline, using laptops, tablets and phones. A single, common easy-to-use web tool permits viewing geospatial asset data stored in GE Smallworld, ESRI ArcGIS, Intergraph GTechnology, spatialNET and Google Maps as well as non-GIS data in Maximo, SAP, three different outage management systems, four or five customer information systems, CAD drawings and photos and images.

At Distributech 2019 a new entrant IQGeo emerged into the utility and communications space and announced an alternative to traditional GIS.  myWorld Capture is a mobile solution that prioritizes direct data maintenance from the field.  Building on an open source geospatial platform that supports data versioning and interfaces to legacy utility/communications GISs such as ArcGIS and Smallworld, myWorld provides tools that make it possible to develop and maintain a high quality near real-time GIS with the information that is required for a complete network asset data model including equipment location, descriptions, connectivity, condition, and status.

Open access to municipal geospatial data

At GITA 2018 in Phoenix, Bob Basques, GIS Systems Developer at the City of St Paul, described a system called COMPASS he and his team have developed an easy to use tool that allows city employees and the public access to all of the City's spatial and associated data including, for example, scans of surveyors' notebooks, 2.2 million street level photos, and permitting and licensing information from 200 different applications. Based completely on open source components the system is compact and efficient enough to run on a Raspberry Pi.

Integrating BIM and 3D geospatial

At the GEO|Design+BIM conference I discovered mago3D a 3D web-based geo-platform developed by Gaia3D.  It is open source and integrates many well-known open source geospatial products and APis. It has an engine for handling massive, complex BIM objects that supports LOD (level of detail) control and efficient spatial queries and culling (the removal of objects that are not visible to the observer which is key to efficient visualization or large, complex structures.) It integrates with two of the best known open source 3D virtual globe tools, Cesium and NASA WorldWind, for visualization in a geospatial context.  Viewing BIM structures in mago3D has some similarities with a Google Earth experience. The source code is available under open source licenses.

Machine learning

Deep learning algorithms have been developed by academia and as a result the code for the most part is open source. For example, a deep neural network model developed originally for medical image segmentation called U-Net is open source and has been applied to identifying building footprints. Successful training of deep networks requires thousands of labeled training samples. Labeled data involves people on the ground manually ground-truthing land use types and other features so that the deep learning algorithms can learn what to recognize.  Machine learning is computationally intensive and requires a distributed engine.  Spark is a open source (Apache) project which enables distributed processing for global scale computation. Machine learning has been used successfully to identify building footprints and transportation networks and deforestation in satellite imagery.

RasterFrames is a free and open source toolkit allowing scientists, data scientists, and software developers to process and analyze geospatial-temporal raster data with the same flexibility and ease as any other data type.  Open source training data is beginning to become available, for example, the System for Terrrestrial Ecosystem Parameterization (STEP) has 2000 manually labeled sites covering 17 different land cover types including five forest types scattered across all continents.

Pipeline siting

To identify an optimal route for a pipeline on your own local hardware involves stitching together many DEMs, calculating slopes, finding, downloading and integrating hundreds of data layers, and avoiding certain areas (protected or uncooperative owners).  You have to worry about having enough disk space and the calculations can take a long time with no certainty of completion.  Running these calculations on several machines in parallel requires an ArcGIS licence for each of the machines.  Together this could result in months of data collection and processing.  In contrast even for long pipelines an open source solution from Pivvot running in the cloud means you don't have to worry about file management and disk capacity or getting enough machines and licenses to run it in parallel. Using Pivvot's curated datasets data collection and processing can be done in a few hours and it is scalable to many data layers.

Migrating to an open source platform is easier than you think

Samuel Song is responsible for the National Cemetery GIS implementation within Veterans Affairs and like many in government increased use of GIS means a greater sensitivity to cost.  Samuel outlined his experience in migrating to open source at a GIS in the Rockies conference in Denver.

 He had been using ArcGIS Desktop as his desktop GIS, SQL Server as a database, ArcGIS Enterprise as a web server, and ArcGIS API for Javascript for his web GIS. To look at ways to lower his costs Samuel experimented with open source geospatial software; QGIS for his desktop GIS, PostgreSQL/PostGIS for his database, GeoServer for his web server, and Leaflet or OpenLayers for his web GIS (all part of the OSGEO open source geospatial stack). His most important findings are that QGIS is a very stable, powerful alternative to ArcMap, PostgreSQL/PostGIS is a stable alternative to SQL Server and perhaps most importantly migrating data to an open source spatial database from an ESRI Geodatabase was much easier than he expected. His overall conclusion was that with the currently available open source software stack it is possible to move to a fully open source platform from an existing ArcGIS implementation and that the migration is much simpler than expected.

Records management for utilities

One of the challenges faced by large utilities with multiple GIS, outage management, customer information and other systems, which are often the result of mergers, is how to make spatial and associated data, in different, often incompatible systems, accessible to all users not just GIS professionals.  At Distributech 2018 I discovered how Duke Energy is running an off-the-shelf web-based product based on open source components that is being used by 8000 users, 2000 of them using it 24/7 every day, to access GIS and associated data in several GIS systems, both online and offline, using laptops, tablets and phones. A single, common easy-to-use web tool permits viewing geospatial asset data stored in GE Smallworld, ESRI ArcGIS, Intergraph GTechnology, spatialNET and Google Maps as well as non-GIS data in Maximo, SAP, three different outage management systems, four or five customer information systems, CAD drawings and photos and images.

Samuel Song is responsible for the National Cemetery GIS implementation within Veterans Affairs and like many in government increased use of GIS means a greater sensitivity to cost.  Samuel outlined his experience in migrating to open source at a GIS in the Rockies conference in Denver.

 He had been using ArcGIS Desktop as his desktop GIS, SQL Server as a database, ArcGIS Enterprise as a web server, and ArcGIS API for Javascript for his web GIS. To look at ways to lower his costs Samuel experimented with open source geospatial software; QGIS for his desktop GIS, PostgreSQL/PostGIS for his database, GeoServer for his web server, and Leaflet or OpenLayers for his web GIS (all part of the OSGEO open source geospatial stack). His most important findings are that QGIS is a very stable, powerful alternative to ArcMap, PostgreSQL/PostGIS is a stable alternative to SQL Server and perhaps most importantly migrating data to an open source spatial database from an ESRI Geodatabase was much easier than he expected. His overall conclusion was that with the currently available open source software stack it is possible to move to a fully open source platform from an existing ArcGIS implementation and that the migration is much simpler than expected.

BIM and geospatial for facilities management is penetrating construction

Typically at BIMForum events, the audience is composed of architects, engineers and construction contractors, with the odd owner, but rarely facilities management (FM) folks. At this year's BIMForum 2019 conference in St Louis several talks addressed how BIM and geospatial add value during the operate and maintain phase of a construction project. In his talk Saurabh Gangwar of Clark Construction Group) explained the why, what and how of Clark's application of BIM to facilities management including a couple of case studies.

On many projects information provided by the construction contractor is handed over months after completion of the project. It can take the operator of the facility a year to go through this information to find the information required to operate the facility. This period is what is called the "blind spot" corresponding to the time the facility operator is managing the facility with limited information. Since for many types of equipment the highest probability of failure is in their first month or two of operation - just during the period that the building operator often doesn't have access to information about warranties and extended warranties - this increases the risk of equipment and even facility failures. In addition there is a cost associated with just finding the information required to service equipment.

Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.

Over the past decade, there has been impressive progress in developing open standards for the integration of geospatial and AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) views of city infrastructure which provides a standards-based basis for full lifecycle management from design through to operations and maintenance of infrastructure projects.

Why:

FM data is collected to support a number of activities including space management and renovations and both preventative and reactive building maintenance.

What:

Traditionally with a design-build approach to construction, FM data collection involves compiling as-builts, printed, pdfs, and 2D CAD drawings and operations and maintenance manuals that are required to operate and maintain a structure.  With a BIM approach most of the information required for operation and maintenance is collected during design and construction.  Four types of data comprise what is required for FM; geometric data, parametric data, field data, and O&M submittal data.  Geometric is the 3D model created with a tool such as Revit.  Parametric data is comprised of properties of assets associated with a building or other structure.  A key property is the location of the asset.  Another important property is classification using Uniformat, Omniclass or COBie.  Field data is data collected in the field often with the aid of asset tagging.  O&M submittal data involves warranty and safety information associated with each facility and piece of equipment.

Coordinate systems

One of the challenges on construction projects is that there are multiple coordinate systems; the architects, MEP and FM folks may use different coordinate systems. Saurabh explained that the most important requirement for efficient FM is agreeing on a single coordinate system. If the FM software used by the owner requires or is linked to a GIS, then the coordinate system with be a real world projection.  This reflects the experience of other construction firms on full life cycle projects, that a real world coordinate system shoudl be used from project inception.

How:

Data is created or collected using BIM design tools, spreadsheets, COBie, or FMCloud tools like Autodesk BIM 360, Onuma, or KTrack.  An Not one of these tools is good for all four types of data required by FM.  The FM solution that is used on different projects combinations of all four. Another important issue is that the designers create design BIM models, while contractors create and use construction models, typically built up from scratch independent of the design models.

For example, one of the projects Clark was responsible for was Kansas City International Airport.  On this project construction COBIe was a requirement and BIM models were relied on for geometric and parametric data stripping out some information that was not relevant for FM.  Field data was collected with an FM Cloud application.

As owners see the advantages full-lifecycle thinking for construction projects and are beginning to changing their procurement practices, construction companies are changing their business processes to optimize facility maintenance and operation. Construction companies that have taken on the challenge of design, build, operate and maintain projects are realizing that there are significant benefits from an integrated BIM+geospatial approach to full lifecycle construction. Standards organizations in both the AEC and geospatial worlds are making progress on BIM+geospatial interoperability. Over a year ago major software vendors Autodesk and ESRI announced an agreement to partner for greater interoperability between their products.

A survey of the FM industry found that while 92% had heard about BIM and 84% agreed that BIM has the potential to deliver value add to FM, over two thirds said that the FM is not prepared for BIM.  Evidence suggests that full lifecyle construction including FM is gaining traction in the construction industry.  The time is ripe for FM vendors to learn more about BIM and geospatial and their application to asset management.

Toward automating scan-to-BIM for brownfield substations

With about 55,000 transmission substations in the U.S. and the average age of the transformers in these substations over 40 years old, many substations are going to be refurbished, retrofitted, extended or upgraded. Utilities are opting to create digital twins of their existing substations as part of this process to enable maintenance and upgrading activities to be performed more efficiently. For older substations records may consist in outdated 2D paper drawings or documents may be missing altogether.  New digital scanning technology together with machine learning is making it possible to semi-automate the process of creating intelligent BIM models from point clouds derived from laser scanning or photography.

Companies are recognizing the benefits of an integrated geospatial and building information modeling (BIM) approach to design and construction. I blogged about the winner of the Year in Infrastructure 2019 award who applied BIM processes and reality modeling on a brownfield substation expansion project. The integrated approach enabled the organization to cut design time, minimize site visits, reduce land requirement and material waste, and, most importantly, eliminate change orders during construction.

Now reality capture and deep learning have been incorporated in a substation design product to semi-automate the scan-to-BIM process for brownfield substations.

primtech is a CAD-based design tool for high voltage substations.  An important recent enhancement Optical Symbol Recognition (OSR) allows point clouds from laser scanning or photography to be imported and then to apply machine learning to semi-automate the process of creating an intelligent BIM model. 

The software includes an extensive library, which contains more than four thousand intelligent 2D and 3D electrical devices from different manufacturers, steel structures, foundations, and wires and tubes.  The library has been growing for over 15 years and includes new equipment and elements as well as for legacy assets.  Each symbol (device, steel or foundation, etc.) has a specific geometric signature in the database in addition to meta data, file links, connection points and defined object behaviors. Together these comprise smart objects that enables objects in point clouds to be recognized and converted into an intelligent substation information model. The resulting intelligent model provides the basis for the calculations required in the substation engineering process.

The OSR process consists of two phases; first conductors are created and then equipment is added. A wire can be created by simply selecting three points, first anchor point, maximum sag point and end anchor point. For tubes, two or more points can be selected. Wires and tubes are available in the library for different conductor types according to international standards.  After conductors has been created and placed, the OSR tool provides a list of compatible library symbols for each symbol type. It is up to the user to choose which symbol should be selected. The user can select the perfect matching symbol or another one in the list. A similar workflow applies to all the other symbols like support structures and foundation heads. The system then combines the symbols to create assemblies (electrical device, support structure, foundation head) and places them in the model. Once an assembly has been created, the OSR tool will recognize identical assemblies in the point cloud and propose it for those positions in the substation. The wires are automatically attached to the respective electrical connection points on the equipment upon the insertion of the assemblies.  After the OSR tool has examined all objects in the point cloud and they have been mapped to an assembly in the model, a logical and intelligent primtech BIM model has been created. The model can be used as a full-fledged template for extension or retrofit - to create parts lists and plans as well as to carry out calculations including phase checking, clearance calculation, lightning protection calculation, sag and short-circuit effects calculations.

The new OSR technology is not fully automatic but drastically improves efficiency and reliability of converting point clouds into intelligent 3D models.This is an important advance that could dramatically improve the process of scanning brownfield substations and generating  intelligent models by making the process more efficient and less error-prone.

M. Kokorus, F. Pizarro, W. Eyrich and S. Heuser, "From Optical Symbol Recognition (OSR) of Point Clouds to the Substation Information Model," 2018 IEEE/PES Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition (T&D), Denver, CO, USA, pp. 1-4., 16-19 April, 2018

Read more about substation design

Assessment of BIM adoption by government in Québec

Beginning in 2006/2007 a number of national governments including Finland, Norway, U.S., U.K., France, Singapore, Russia and others  began mandating building information modeling (BIM) for public construction projects.  Although the private sector in Canada has been quite active in adopting BIM, at the government and institutional level BIM penetration has been limited. The two provinces where there has been significant progress in developing BIM awareness at the government level are Québec and Alberta. A recent report based on a survey of public owners in the province of Québec aims at capturing a picture of the deployment of BIM in Québec from the perspective of public owners in order to identify gaps in BIM adoption and provide a basis for the development of a comprehensive strategy for BIM deployment in Quebec.

Background

There is a general consensus that the development of BIM in Canada lags many other developed countries around the globe. This can be ascribed partly to little encouragement from government procurement at the federal and provincial levels.

The Canadian architecture, engineering, construction and owners (AECO) industry represent about $300 billion in capital expenditure, approximately 20% of the Canadian GDP. The construction industry employs over 1.3 million people or 7.5% of total workforce distributed across more than 120 000 enterprises.

Although a number of private AEC firms in Canada have adopted BIM and are using it on major projects, government procurement with some exceptions does not require or incentivize BIM on public projects. An exception is the the Department of National Defence (DND) which began adopting BIM in a significant way a number of years ago.  BIM requirements have appeared for years in RFPs from Alberta Infrastructure and Infrastructure Ontario, but there has not been a concerted effort to advance BIM as there has been in other countries.

On the provincial government procurement policy front Quebec and Alberta represent the leading edge of planned BIM advancement by top levels of provincial government in Canada. In Quebec the Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) developed an action plan for the progressive and gradual adoption of BIM and related technology.  Since 2016, the SQI has had a rolling deployment plan for BIM that is based on the evolution of the maturity of Québec industry. The University of Alberta completed a review in 2016 of international BIM standards and released Digital Project Delivery and Handover Standards last year.

State of BIM adoption by public owners in Quebec

The Initiative Québécoise pour la Construction 4.0 (Groupe BIM du Québec) has just released a report Macro Building Information Modeling (BIM) adoption in the province of Quebec Canada based on a survey of eleven public owners at the federal, provincial and municipal levels as well as representing public institutions (eg. Universities) and provincial associations. The objectives of the study are to capture a picture of the deployment of BIM in Québec from the perspective of public owners and associations and identify gaps in BIM adoption to provide a basis for the development of a comprehensive strategy for BIM deployment in Quebec.  Eleven organization responded to the survey including three at the federal level, five at the provincial level, and three at the municipal and institutional level.

A key question asked of the respondents was about the overall understanding of the benefits of BIM by policy makers in their respective organizations. A majority of respondents at the federal and municipal levels indicated that policy makers were only partially aware of the benefits of BIM. Provincial respondents reported a higher awareness of the benefits of BIM. It was concluded that there is a need for greater awareness about the BIM value proposition as part of the digitalization of the construction industry.

The survey found that indicated there were no local, provincial, or national standards or regulatory directives that were obligatory (such as the Canadian National Building Code or Canadian National Energy Code). Furthermore the survey indicated that current insurance policies don’t reflect the realities of BIM-enabled project delivery.  BIM mandates are still sparse across Quebec and at the federal level. However, there is active engagement and widespread support by most respondents in the digital transformation agenda. Interestingly, only a small majority of respondents indicated that their organization had developed pilot projects.

The findings also suggest there is little in the way of development of formal process maps to guide digital workflows and deliverables for project participants. The survey found that BIM specific education and training is still very marginal within organizations. While specific programs in BIM education  can be found in colleges and universities across Quebec and Canada, there does not seem to be a concerted or coherent BIM education plan across Quebec.

Affordability of technology was not a key issue in influencing large scale BIM adoption rates. However, there are technological issues including cloud-based computing and file exchange as well as data security concerns.

Key takeaways from the survey highlight the need to focus on municipal and institutional bodies being the procurers and managers of considerable (if not a majority) of Canada’s built environment.

The key recommendation from the study was the development of a national BIM strategy including a harmonized strategy for BIM deployment across Canada with action items with clear responsibilities attributed to the various stakeholders involved in this transformation effort and milestones.