Between the Poles

Power utility identifies 60-70% productivity improvement by integrating engineering design, GIS and enterprise systems

In the last few years strong business drivers for improving power distribution design productivity including an aging and shrinking workforce, an accelerating transition to the smart grid and a rapidly changing utility business model have emerged which are motivating utilities to transform their century old business practices.  With new technologies utilities are finding that they can improve productivity by up to  60-70 % by integrating graphical design, engineering calculations such as flicker, voltage drop, guying, enforcement of engineering standards, and integration with enterprise systems to automate bill of materials generation and job estimating.

Distribution design in the power industry

Designing electric power distribution systems involves CAD drafting, engineering calculations such as sag, flicker, voltage drop, guying, wind loading, pulling tension and clearance and checking them against engineering standards to avoid under-engineering, using compatible units to compute jobs estimates, and comparing costs of different equipment to limit over-engineering.  In many utilities distribution design remains a laborious error-prone process with redundant data entry, back of the envelope engineering calculations and manual lookups.

Furthermore once a design is completed it undergoes a typically paper-based workflow (especially for major jobs) that is inefficient and error-prone.  The CAD design is printed for construction contractors to use in the field.  After construction is completed the paper "as-built" comes back from the field to records possibly with red-lines that indicate what was actually constructed.  The key metrics for this workflow are the as-built backlog and the accuracy of asset location in the utility GIS.  These metrics are important for utilities because they directly affect key statistics such as average outage duration (SAIDI) reported by utilities to regulators.  As examples: I remember a small utility in upstate New York where an engineer told me he spent two hours in the snow and darkness looking for a failed device and ultimately had to come back in the morning light to finally locate it.  A large telecom I worked with could not locate some assets to within two city blocks which not only added to the time locating equipment that required maintenance but reduced the reliability of availability of services calculations.  Fashioning AEC and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represents a challenge that remains a problem for utilities.  The result of this broken workflow is an out-of-date, unreliable GIS that inhibits field workers from optimal productivity and complicates reporting of operational performance.

Business drivers for improving productivity

Utilities are facing business drivers that are motivating them to improve the productivity of their business processes and improving data quality including locational accuracy of assets to provide a near real-time digital twin of their assets.  These drivers include an aging work force, the replacement of older workers by younger less experienced workers, a reliable near real-time GIS as the foundation for developing a smart grid, and a rapidly evolving utility business model that changes utility priorities.

With the new business models emerging in New York and other jurisdictions, utilities' focus is shifting from selling energy to maintaining a reliable and resilient grid which makes reducing the frequency and duration of outages more critical.

Benefits of integrating engineering design, GIS and enterprise systems

In the last decade or so technology advances have provided a solution for low distribution design productivity and out-of-date and unreliable utility GIS.  I have described the system developed by Southern California Edison (SCE) to integrate distribution and transmission graphical design (AutoCAD), utility GIS (Smallworld) and back office systems including ERP (SAP), customer service system, crew scheduling (Clicksoft), field operations (eMobile) and finance (SAP and PowerPlant).  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 the designer to generate job estimates. The compatible unit workflow involves many systems including design, crew scheduling, materials ordering, and fixed asset accounting. As an example, at SCE designers were required to manually list the bill of materials on the design drawing and reenter it, again manually, in the materials ordering system.  SCE's integrated system was successful in improving productivity by bringing consistency and efficiency to distribution and transmission design, eliminating manual lookup, enforcing engineering standards to reduce the risk of under-engineering and avoiding the costs of over-engineering, and reducing or eliminating redundant data entry. The integrated system enables experienced workers to work faster with fewer errors and younger workers to become productive sooner.  It sped up the design to GIS workflow and resulted in improved quality of the data in the utility GIS.

However, while the system implemented at SCE demonstrated the success of an integrated approach, it was a bespoke integration of design, enterprise GIS, ERP and other products and is beyond the reach of small and medium size utilities. 

Benefits of a productized integrated solution

At Distributech 2019 I linked up with Dennis Beck of Spatial Business Systems (SBS), which took over responsibility for future development, support and licensing of AutoCAD Utility Design (AUD) software in 2016. He explained that SBS has transformed the architecture of the SCE integrated solution into off-the-shelf products that enable it to be cost-effectively implemented at any size utility.  One of SBS's customers has determined in detail the productivity benefits of an integrated architecture with SBS components for their engineering design workflow.

Nashville Electric Service (NES) is a publicly owned, nonprofit company that serves more than 355,000 customers in a large service area in Tennessee.  As part of a major upgrade to their business processes NES benchmarked an integrated automated design, utility GIS and enterprise systems solution for two engineering design jobs using SBS components.  NES performed the two jobs four different ways and assiduously recorded the time required for each step of the design process.  This allowed them to estimate the quantitative benefits of different aspects of the integrated solution.  The major components of the NES solution architecture were

• Automated design -  AUD is an AutoCAD-based desktop application that provides a model-based approach to design and bill of material generation along with a comprehensive set of engineering tools, including flicker, voltage drop, guying, and pulling tension and clearance checking.  It supports both overhead and underground distribution design.

• GIS integration - Integrating graphical engineering design with the utility GIS helps reduce as-built backlogs which are a major contributor to out-of-date utility GIS.

• Enterprise integration - Integrating engineering design and utility GIS with the utility's work order system, material management and financial systems makes it possible to automatically enforce engineering standards, generate construction work orders, layouts, bills of materials, design scenarios and estimated costs.

NES calculated the benefits of each level of improvement as applied to overhead and underground residential distribution design.

	Overhead Time (mins)	Overhead Time saved (%)	Underground Time (mins)	Underground Time saved (%)
AutoCAD	173		81
Automated design (AUD)	145	16 %	63	22 %
AUD with GIS integration	132	8 %	50	14 %
AUD with GIS and enterprise integration	69	36 %	23	34 %
Total savings	104	60 %	58	70 %

The analysis revealed important benefits from model- and rule-based approaches to engineering design. It enabled behind-the-scene calculation of physical things like wire sag, flicker and voltage drop. An important contributor to productivity improvement was to completely avoid the need to lookup or manually find engineering and drafting standards. The largest benefits from a productivity perspective were found by integration with enterprise systems especially compatible units which enabled automated bill of materials generation and job estimation.

NES further broke the overall workflow into subtasks including drafting, annotation, job estimating and enforcing engineering standards and analyzed the productivity improvements for each of these subtasks.

Overhead residential design	AutoCAD	Automated design (AUD)	AUD with GIS integration	AUD with GIS and enterprise integration
Drafting	60 mins	95 mins	82 mins	61 mins
Annotation	36	36	36	8
Job estimating	24	14	14	0
Engineering standards	53	0	0	0

 

Underground residential design	AutoCAD	Automated design (AUD)	AUD with GIS integration	AUD with GIS and enterprise integration
Drafting	25 mins	31 mins	18 mins	18 mins
Annotation	22	22	22	5
Job estimating	24	10	10	0
Engineering standards	10	0	0	0

The analysis revealed that while an integrated approach to design did not significantly change the time required for actual graphical drafting, it dramatically reduced the time required for annotation, applying engineering standards, and job estimating (including BOM generation).  These improvements in productivity were derived primarily from eliminating redundant data entry and manual lookup.  Another significant point is that these timings only represent the time savings to engineering design – they do not include savings on re-entry of data into the GIS from as-builts.

Other benefits that NES did not quantify include avoiding the risks associated with under-engineering, reducing the costs of over-engineering, increased quality of the utility GIS by recording engineering designs directly in the GIS rather than re-entering it from paper as-builts, and enabling less experienced workers to come up to speed faster without increasing the risk of errors or significantly reduced productivity.

Improving productivity of distribution design by up to 60-70% is a huge benefit.  SBS is finding that other customers are reporting similar experiences, although they haven't documented their productivity gains as meticulously as NES has done. For utilities that are facing a significant portion of their workforce retiring, this improvement in productivity can free up experienced engineers and others to accelerate the transition to the smart grid and to adapt to a rapidly changing utility business model.

Bringing reliable near real-time GIS within reach of every utility

Workflows for ensuring utility GIS quality are fundamentally broken and have been for decades.  Integrating CAD and GIS into an efficient workflow has been a challenge and it has simply not been a priority in the utility industry and in some parts of the communications sector to ensure real-time, high quality asset GIS data. Recently business drivers for high quality GIS data such as implementing a smart grid, estimating service availability and other applications have made GIS quality a top priority.  And now non-traditional geospatial companies are offering geospatial-based technologies that are revolutionizing the capture and maintenance of GIS information about utility and communications assets that can provide a foundation for the real-time network digital twin that is essential in the era of the smart grid and our increasing dependence on communications and utility networks. 

Broken business processes degrades GIS data quality

Maintaining accurate, up-to-date asset data has been a challenge for utility and communications firms for decades.  Over the years the lack of CAD/GIS interoperability has cost communications and utility companies hundreds of millions of dollars trying to cleanup their GIS data and streamline their CAD+GIS workflows.  One of the persistent themes from the very beginning of the Between The Poles was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data in a common workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).  Critical metrics for utility readiness for the smart grid is the as-built backlog, field update backlog and the location accuracy of the assets in the utility's GIS.  It is not uncommon for as-built backlogs to stretch into months even years, for updates from the field to take months to be entered into the records database if they are entered at all, and for the location of assets as recorded in the GIS to be city blocks from its actual location.   The challenge is to fashion workflows that include both engineering and geospatial data and applications into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance with feedback loops that ensures an accurate, near real-time GIS.  For many utilities and communications firms traditional GIS, which has been the standard platform for utility GIS for the past few decades, has simply not delivered cost-effective, real-time, high quality asset location and associated data.

A key workflow found at all utilities and communications firms is the field maintenance process.  In many utilities this is a broken feedback loop which results in the quality of GIS data degrading over time.  When a field crew performs maintenance on network infrastructure, which includes routine and emergency maintenance, or encounters equipment incorrectly located or described in the GIS, the changes or the corrections to the GIS data from the field need to get back into the GIS quickly.  Too frequently this is still a paper-based process typically involving redlining as-builts, which get to sent to records for updating in the GIS.  The backlog associated with field updates can stretch into months.  The slow turnaround of field updates discourage field staff from reporting corrections and changes further exacerbating the GIS quality problem.  The result of this and other broken workflows such as the as-buillt workflow is that not only is GIS data incomplete, inaccurate and out-of-date, but that its quality degrades with time.

Business drivers for accurate, real-time GIS

For communications companies a major driver for an accurate and up-to-date GIS is providing rapid availability of service estimates to prospective customers.  I remember a large U.S. telecom that because it could not rely on the information in its GIS had to resurvey all the locations of its fiber terminations in order to respond to potential ADSL customers indicating whether they were close enough to a fiber termination for the service.

For electric power utilities a powerful business driver that has emerged in the last few years is the smart grid.  Digitalizing the grid has made the role of geospatial data and technology strategic for utilities. As a Navigant Research report stated the smart grid is all about situation awareness and effective anticipation of and response to events that might disrupt the performance of the power grid. Since spatial data underlies everything an electric utility does, GIS is the only foundational view that can potentially link every operational activity of an electric utility including design and construction, asset management, workforce management, and outage management as well as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distribution management systems (DMSs), renewables, and strategy planning. As John Simmins of EPRI has reiterated on a number of occasions a prerequisite to implementing a smart grid is cleaning up GIS data and developing business processes (feedback processes) to ensure that it remains accurate and up-to-date.

Technology enablers: Open standards, open source geospatial and handhelds

Recent technical advances have made it possible to implement cost-efficient processes for ensuring that utility asset data including GIS data is accurate and up-to-date.  There are now many widely adopted geospatial standards; Simple Features for SQL, WMS, WFS, GML, KML, and InfraGML to name just a few from the OGC that were not available two decades ago.  Secondly, since the founding of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) in 2006 there has been rapid development of open source geospatial projects including PostGIS, GeoServer, MapServer, Leaflet and others.  This 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.  Thirdly the advent of the handheld touch screen computer and phone provides a low cost universally accessible hardware platform for field staff to access geospatial and other information stored in a utility's databases.  With the appropriate software smart phones and tablets make it possible for field staff to see all of the information about an asset in the field at the touch of a finger.  For example, I blogged about how Duke Energy field staff are using an open source based mobile application which provides a single, common easy-to-use web tool for 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.

Shifting the paradigm: GIS data maintenance from the field

The paradigm shift is empowering field staff to take responsibility for the quality of data in the utility GIS. Since they have direct knowledge about the location and condition of utility infrastructure, the key to revolutionizing data maintenance and enabling near real-time, accurate GIS and other data is "cutting out the middle man" and enabling field staff to maintain the utility GIS and other data in the field as they are working. Enabling field folks to do this without adding significantly to their workload (and over time reducing their workload as the quality of the GIS improves) requires a simple "touch and go" user interface which minimizes typing, responsive applications running on handhelds, and workflows that enable field staff to see their changes with a minimum delay measured in hours or days at the maxium.  Of course, operational data can be protected from problematic updates using data versioning technology (long transactions) which provides a rapid way for records folks to review and identify potentially problematic updates.

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. 

The key to ensuring that the data is high quality and up-to-date is empowering field workers to make updates at the source as the work happens and to automate the data maintenance workflow as much as possible.  This approach can eliminate backlogs in field updates, encourage field staff to take responsibility for ensuring the quality of the utility GIS and enable an effective feedback loop that improves GIS data quality over time.   With the promise of near real-time updates directly from the field this approach provides a key foundation for the digital twin of the grid that integrates sensors reporting in real-time with simulation and analytics that makes it possible to create a accurate real-time situation assessment and to model the electrical state of the grid and possible future states based on reported or forecast outages and planned expansions and other changes to the electric network.

Operationalizing the new paradigm

How does this work in real world practice? I had a chance to chat with Dick Rohm, Director of Engineering at Cable One about how they are progressing toward their goal of no backlogs for field updates or for as-builts.  The business driver for this initiative, which they have been working on for the past several years, is service availability - being able to tell a customer immediately whether a fiber service is available at the customer's location or whether it will require an addition to the network.

Cable One provides commercial fiber services to businesses as well as cable services in 21 states, primarily in small cities and big towns.  Sales success requires being able to respond rapidly to potential customers requests for business fiber service, and say yes we already have the fiber capacity in your neighbourhood or no we have to build out a fiber line to support you.  Improving the quality of the data in their GIS is an important business driver for Cable One.  

By prioritizing as-built and update workflows Cable One has managed to ensure that as-builts and updates are in the GIS quickly, typically within 2-3 business days.  To achieve this, they first changed the as-built process, making the design process paperless about five years ago. Their engineering GIS allows engineers to use AutoCAD to design fiber and RF networks directly into GIS .  For construction, contractors are provided with AutoCAD drawings (DWG) on thumb drives and it is up to them if they wish to print them.  For small jobs, contractors can work completely electronically. For large jobs, contractors still use paper, but they print the DWG files themselves. Contractors must register with Cable One's Project Central which is used to track all projects. When paper as-builts are returned, they are spot-checked, and the GIS is updated based on any redlines. A project will not be closed out (and contractors paid) until redlines are in the GIS.  The GIS is used by Marketing and Sales as an added application to myWorld.

For updates from the field the initial idea was to use a web extension to their GIS, but they found that it was too cumbersome and slow.  It was replaced by myWorld on a handheld working with Google or Bing Maps which provided front end for viewing all engineering geospatial and associated data in the field. The myWorld solution only requires about an hour training time using a video. 

Based on the success of the myWorld implementation, user acceptance testing of myWorld Capture is currently underway. myWorld Capture enables field staff to update GIS and other data as they work.  Ease-of-use and rapid response are its key features. It makes it possible for field validators to do most of their work by tapping and drag and drop with very little typing.  Field engineering staff have to do more typing but even for them it is minimal.

The objective of the myWorld Capture implementation is 24-hour turnaround for updates from the field. It could even be less, but it is currently limited by the process of posting updates to the GIS and to the MyWorld database, which occur every night.  myWorld Capture will roll out to all field staff by July 1 of this year.
Dick Rohm emphasized that the key to making a transformative project, such as this at Cable One, successful is changing thought processes in the field. Data needs to be treated as just as important as physical assets.  When something changes or an error is found, the priority for field staff is to update it.  To encourage field staff to make changes in the GIS, tools need to be provided on handhelds that are fast and easy to use. Update processes must be fast so that their changes can be seen by field staff quickly in the GIS. Over time, field folks will increasingly rely on the GIS because they will see corrections that they make from the field appear in the database within 24 hours or sooner.  As data quality improves as a result of this feedback loop, field staff will find that they can rely on the GIS for locating and accessing up-to-date information about assets.

Conclusion

Prioritizing updates from the field to reduce the field update backlog to 24 hours or better together with an as-built backlog on the order of two to three days is a remarkable achievement.  It shows that with a business perspective that prioritizes a near real-time, reliable digital twin of utility and communications networks and geospatial technology supporting open standards and based on opensource and implemented for handhelds in the field, a cost-effective solution to the decades old GIS data quality challenge is within the grasp of any utility or communications firm.

Firm realizes ROI of 203% by integrating CAD and GIS for fiber network management

Integrating CAD and GIS into an efficient workflow for records management (aka network documentation) has been a challenge for utility and telecom operators for decades.  While utility and telecom operators have found ways to address this problem, it is rare to find the benefits for these systems quantified.  At Year in Infrastructure this year iForte Solusi Infotek presented concrete benefits of a records management system that has been in operation for several years for managing their fiber optic networks in Jakarta and on the rest of Java.

I began working in the utility and telecom sector in 1993, specifically in developing software for records management (called network documentation outside of North America).  At that time the magnitude of the AEC+geospatial cultural mismatch problem was just beginning to be appreciated by utilities and telecoms.  Planners tend to use GIS tools, engineers and designers CAD tools, construction folks in the field paper CAD drawings, and asset managers GIS integrated with their FM tools. Fashioning engineering and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represented a challenge that remains a problem for utilities and telecom companies. The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from the very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data and applications in an efficient workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

The winner of this year's Year in Infrastructure Award for Communications Networks was a project of iForte Solusi Infotek.   iForte is a fast-growing fiber network operator with many large corporate customers all over Java island including Jakarta.  From this base it plans to expand into the rest of Indonesia.  iForte was facing many of the problems associated with paper-based records management in a fast-growing network operator. Prior to implementing the new system, their business processes were characterized by a plethora of paper-based manual processes. The data available for network planning was continually out of date making it difficult to compile an accurate situational assessment. Maintenance crews in the field had to rely on their own hand written notes on paper records. When sales staff met with a prospective customer it took an hour or more to collect the required information to determine the availability of fiber optic capacity at the customer's location requiring subsequent exchanges of emails to get the requisite information to the customer by which time the customer may have contacted a competitor.

The primary benefits of the new system were realized in planning, network maintenance and sales. 

• Maintenance crews could redline existing as-builts in the field so that engineering could see immediately where a problem had occurred and any temporary infrastructure the maintenance team had put in place to address the problem.
• Planning could see real-time cable utilization to identify congested networks. When there was an outage they could see the total capacity that was at risk.  It also enabled them to find alternatives for re-routing the network.  It was also found that network expansion planning could be completed four times faster. They were also able to use less fiber, saving on material costs and CAPEX. For example in one case, by looking at available capacity and utilization, it was possible to reduce new cable requirements from 1,400 meter to 100.
• For sales prior to implementing the records management system, determining fibre availability for a customer required on average of 60 minutes necessitating telephone calls to records. After implementing the new system, they were able to determine availability in six minutes and automatically generate a bill of materials and a job estimate.

For these activities iForte estimated that it has realized a return on investment of 203% over three years.

The primary benefits of the new system were realized in planning, network maintenance and sales, but there were intangible benefits as well.  Management was able to see the status of the network in real-time, review progress in building out the network on a map with demographics, assess the status of their network assets, and identify regions for network expansion.  The intangible value to the company achieved with the new system was operational excellence and improved strategic planning which provided for better performance and growth compared to competitors.

Geolocation plays a key role in integrating GIS and engineering data and applications for optimizing asset management workflows.  One of the reasons for the success of iForte's system is that Bentley decided many years ago to geospatially-enable all of their products including Microstation.  Bentley calls this capability geocoordination. It provides a location-aware foundation which facilitates workflows that require integrated engineering and geospatial data and applications.

ESRI and Autodesk partnership for BIM and geospatial interoperability: one year later

The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. After the announcement about a year ago by Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost of a new relationship to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies, I thought it a good time to review progress toward interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.

ESRI and Autodesk partnership

In the mid-1990s Autodesk and ESRI, market leaders in their respective areas of CAD and GIS, attempted to collaborate to address the CAD and GIS interoperability problem. The result of the agreement between Jack Dangermond and Carol Bartz at the time resulted in an unsuccessful product called ArcCAD, which satisfied neither CAD nor GIS users.

A year ago Autodesk and ESRI, again agreed to collaborate. Expected benefits cited by Autodesk and ESRI from BIM and GIS interoperability include "unprecedented reductions in permitting through improved stakeholder engagement, more sustainable and resilient design through enhanced project insight, reduced risk via improved end-to-end flow of materials, resource availability and scheduling during construction," and "providing industry and city planners the ability to design in the context of the real world enabling communities to build connected, resilient, sustainable cities and infrastructure." This time around they are probably more aware of the technical and cultural issues hindering AEC and geospatial interoperability.

Integrating BIM and CAD with GIS

Revit is Autodesk's market-leading BIM application that is utilized by designers for vertical BIM (buildings), although there are landscape architects that have managed to use it as well. Revit models include spatial data and related non-spatial information.  With the release of ArcGIS Pro 2.2 in June 2018 direct reading of Revit BIM (.RVT) files is now supported. In the past Revit models had to be imported through conversion to IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) files and then go through a second conversion to a geodatabase.  ArcGIS Pro 2.2 makes it possible to open a Revit BIM model directly. Tools are provided for correctly georeferencing BIM models in ArcGIS. Revit data added to ArcGIS behaves like any other 3D GIS data and can be queried, measured and analyzed.

ESRI has provided for some time a product for AutoCAD users who want to work with ArcGIS data in a familiar context. It allows CAD users to edit GIS data, navigate drawings using location, imtegrate with GIS, and turn CAD data into GIS data. Shortly after the partnership announcement, an incremental release of ArcGIS for AutoCAD 370 was announced with support for the latest versions of AutoCAD. ESRI product management also promised that the future of ArcGIS for AutoCAD would continue with improved integration with ArcGIS Online/Portal. ArcGIS Pro 2.2 provides updated support for reading and exporting AutoCAD version 2018 and 2019 format files. Furthermore ESRI product management said that other CAD/BIM/AEC applications were being considered for future development using a similar integration pattern as ArcGIS for AutoCAD.

Integrating GIS with civil workflows

InfraWorks is Autodesk's application that allows civil engineers to perform conceptual design for roads and highways in context. InfraWorks 19.2, released in September 2018, now supports the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS. Designers and engineers can bring GIS content from ArcGIS Online into InfraWorks allowing content such as roads, pipelines, and electrical transformers to be directly imported. The link is dynamic making it possible to build an InfraWorks model directly from GIS data published into ArcGIS Online. When the GIS data is updated, the InfraWorks model can be updated and refreshed. With the release of Autodesk Civil 3D 2019 InfraWorks models can be brought into Civil 3D, Autodesk's civil design product. Together these enhancements enable workflows from ArcGIS through InfraWorks to Civil 3D.

Integrating civil and geospatial workflows with BIM

A major challenge is interoperability between Autodesk's own products. A first step for integrating geospatial workflows into Revit is for site preparation. Autodesk offers a Site Designer for Revit plug-in that is intended to enable architects, designers, and planners to shape the terrain for building sites using grading tools to model pads, parking lots, streets, sidewalks, and retaining walls. But the integration between Autodesk's BIM and civil engineering products still inhibits site preparation workflows. Civil 3D was developed on the AutoCAD platform. Revit, which was acquired from Charles River Software in 2002, was built on different data structures. As a recent post from a landscape architecture site pointed out there remains a "gaping hole ... between Civil 3D and Revit".

Improving interoperability between the two products has now become a priority for Autodesk product management. According to the latest Autodesk roadmap associated with the Revit 2019 release, Autodesk is investing in improving how civil engineers and architects can collaborate better on the site design process. The very good news is that according to the Revit product management roadmap, collaboration with Civil 3D and Revit is now an "Accepted Revit Idea", which confirms that Revit/Civil 3D interoperability has become a development priority. Furthermore new features in Civil 3D 2019 includes enhanced structural and civil design collaboration for Civil 3D with Revit..

In conclusion the new relationship between Autodesk and ESRI is being translated into concrete actions to improve the interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.  There is a considerable distance to go yet, but there are grounds for optimism that there is a commitment to BIM and geospatial interoperability so that in the future workflows that involve both AEC and geospatial data and software will be able to surmount the CAD+GIS barriers that have represented major inefficiencies for the construction, utility and other sectors for decades.

Bentley's digital twin capabilities for cities includes underground infrastructure

Proposed West Link tunnel under central Gothenburg

More and more cities are recognizing the tremendous benefits that a digital twin provides to its planners, private architects and engineers striving for compliance with city ordinances and by-laws, and for communicating with the public.  I remember several years ago when the Prime Minister of Singapore in his annual National Day address included a 3D visualization of what the proposed Marina Bay towers would look like - perhaps the first time 3D visualization has been used to inform citizens on a national scale.  At the Year in Infrastructure 2018 in London, Bentley announced the acquisition of Agency9, a Swedish company that provides web and mobile solutions for 3D visualization of geographic information and maps for collaboration and communication with its product CityPlanner (now OpenPlanner).  With this acquistion, Bentley augments its competitive positioning relative to CityZenith (SmartWorldPro), ESRI (CityEngine), and Autodesk (Infraworks) and open source projects such as mago3D in offering a 3D visualization and analytics platform for the massive data sources required for cities including underground infrastructure.

The requirements of a comprehensive platform for city visualization and analysis for planners, architects and engineers, and the public are the ability to support OGC (KML, CityGML and others), BuildingSmart (IFC), defacto (Shape, DWG, DGN, Revit and others) and other standards such as GeoJSON making it possible to integrate GIS, CAD, and BIM (vertical and horizontal) data, content creating and editing tools, for example, to allow buildings to be extruded from footprints and rooves and facades customized, support for open data sources such as OpenStreetMap, ability to integrate satellite, aerial and ground photo imagery and LiDAR point clouds,  support for both above- and below-ground infrastructure, gaming engine support (such as Unity or Unreal Engine) for interactive 3D visualization, cloud processing for managing, processing and querying massive amounts of data, web and mobile access, and APIs for analytics.

From a technical perspective the acquisition made a lot sense because Bentley's ContextCapture (from the acquisition of Acute3D several years ago), which creates 3D meshes for both inside and outside buildings from aerial and ground photo images and LiDAR point clouds, has been used by Agency9 for many years as the basis for its visualization capabilities.

Proposed West Link tunnel under Gothenburg

The West Link (Swedish: Västlänken) is a railway tunnel under construction under central Gothenburg. As an example of its support for underground infrastructure the City of Gothenburg used CityPlanner to publish a 3D visualization of the planned tunnel going below the entire city which showed stations with points of interest with images in a slideshow. During the first 24 hours that the project was published on its web site, it had over 10,000 unique visitors.

Open source viewer sharing all city's geospatial data can run on Raspberry Pi

Locations of Cross Section surveyors' notebooks

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 that provides a shared, 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.

One of the problems that hampers efficient operations at municipalities is accessing geospatial data originating from multiple sources such as infrastructure maintenance, planning and zoning, property ownership, engineering, permitting, licensing and code enforcement. Spatial data is generated by CAD drafters, GIS users, surveyors and even users with smart phone apps. Imagery data can come from a variety of sources including earth observation satellites, aerial overflights, street photography, and drones. This data is constantly changing which means that any process that involves making copies such as converting it to a common format creates a bigger problem than it solves.

Location and maintenance data for each street light

The City of Saint Paul is responsible for infrastructure maintenance for all of the infrastructure within the public right-of-way. It is also responsible for maintaining parcel information linking and addressing assignment. St Paul is only 56 square miles, but it is densely developed and there is a lot of infrastructure and the associated regulations to manage. In addition St Paul is part of the metro area of the Twin Cities and users of St Paul data often need access to data outside of St Paul.

Organizations participating in GeoMoose project

The application is intended to improve the efficiency of common tasks including infrastructure maintenance management, planning and zoning, property ownership, engineering, permitting. licensing and code enforcement. To do this the system accesses multiple disparate data sources from different data custodians including Public Works, Safety and Inspections, Planning and Economic Development, Parks & Recreation, Office of Technology, Fire, Police, Real Estate, and District Councils. The public has access to 73 layers of data through OGC web standard interfaces. The tool, called GeoMoose, is an open source project (MIT license) on OSGeo and uses only open source components. There are quite a few governmental agencies around the U.S participating in the GeoMoose project.

Creating a project polygon and buffer to identify affected parcels and owners

The application is extremely compact and light weight - Bob demonstrated it running an a Raspberry Pi with a 64 GB drive (just about any size MicroSD card will work) - which means that users working in areas with restricted wireless can still access important data. GeoMoose runs on Linux and Windoes and can be accessed via Wifi from Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Mac OS - actually any device with Wifi and a browser including a USB stick. The core of GeoMoose is comprised of HTML and Javascript code. It can access data stored in the file system as well as from OGC WMS/WFS sites over the internet. GeoMoose included an editor that allows users to create geometric objects such as polygons. A typical application would be to define a polygon representing a new project, put a buffer around it and find all the parcels that would be impacted by the project.

The system handles many different data types including 305 layers ( a new layer is added every week or two), 32 live database connections, 39 imagery layers, and 31 infrastructure layers. Besides Public Works users, users from more than 40 other organizations access the system. The system is an OSGeo project and is built on open source components including OpenLayers and MapServer, and can be integrated with PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Webdav, svn and Apache.

Locations of surveyors' notebooks

COMPASS exposes data to the world via OGC standard tools. Most of the data in the COMPASS system of tools is available as a WMS service. Selected datasets are also available as WFS layers. Some layers are protected for security or contractual reasons. GeoMoose 3.0, which was released in August of last year is mobile friendly and supports modern Javascript frameworks such as React.

Digital images of surveyors' notebooks can be accessed

The system has become widely used and trusted. It gets about 50,000 hits per week not only within Public Works but also by other users inside and outside of the city government. It has eased many previously labour intensive processes. Because more users are accessing their data, custodians of the data are taking greater responsibility for data which has led to an overall improvement in data quality and timeliness. Open source has allowed customization for specific users that would not have been possible without access to the underlying code. For example, it has made it possible to create specialized visualizations and reports, connecting to various proprietary databases, mixing data sources on output and building custom lookup processes.

Open source-based mobile viewer creates value for electric power utilities with multiple GISs

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 Duke Energy described 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.  An important advantage of the the selection process Duke used in selecting the product was that it made it possible for a relative newcomer to compete successfully with the traditional GIS incumbents.

Background

Large investor-owned utilities are often the result of mergers. For example, in 2012 Duke Energy and Progress Energy merged to create the largest U.S. utility with 7.4 million U.S. customers and approximately 52,700 megawatts of electric generating capacity. The challenge for the IT folks is how to manage the many disparate IT systems that such mergers bring together. Historically Duke Energy and Progress Energy have employed all the major GIS systems including Synercom, Intergraph FRAMME, GE Smallworld, ESRI, Intergraph GTechnology, and IBM GFIS. Accessing the valuable operational data in multiple systems is a challenge because each system has its own user interface and command structure. Over the years I have seen a number of solutions that have attempted to address the challenge of providing a common viewer for visualizing data from multiple data sources. But each has had limitations, for example, all data had to be synced to a central Oracle database, or it could only run online making it difficult to deploy to the field, or it had limited support for the many GISs and user files used by utilities, or it supported iOS on handheld devices but not Android, or did not support open standards such as OGC WMS and WFS, or did not support Google Maps, or was so complex users required extensive training and it was like pulling teeth to geth them to use iit.

At Distributech 2018 Ron York, Lead Consultant/ GIS, and Francisco Sarmento, Lead Consultant, both at Duke Energy described how Duke has resolved the problem of a common viewer for several different GIS systems which was brought to a head by the merger of Duke and Progress. They also described the somewhat unusual process by which Duke selected the vendor whose product provided the successful solution.

Open source geospatial components

A key differentiator of the product Duke chose is that it is leverages open source components; PostGIS, GeoServer and Leaflet being the main ones. The product builds on the collective wisdom, code and support provided by the worldwide open source geospatial community.  Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. PostGIS adds spatial capabilities to the PostgreSQL relational database. It extends PostgreSQL so it can store, query, and manipulate spatial data. GeoServer is a web server that allows maps and data in a variety of formats to be served to standard clients such as web browsers and desktop GIS programs. Data is published via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard interfaces, such as WMS and WFS.  These are all Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) projects.

Multiple GIS support

The product Duke selected supports ESRI ArcGIS, GE Smallworld, Intergraph GTechnology, spatialNET and Google Maps. At Duke it is used to access data in a couple of GISs as well as non-GIS data in Maximo, SAP, three different outage management systems, four or five customer information systems, and can link to CAD drawings and photos and images.  Importantly for engineering users it preserves the original symbology and background maps of the different GIS systems.

Online and offline

Another key advantage of Duke's solution is that it can run equally well offline and online and is able to seamlessly combine and switch between online and offline data.

Mobile and office devices

It supports mobile as well as office devices, running on laptops, tablets and phones running iOS, Android, and Windows. The user interface adapts automatically for each device, displaying map layers, forms and other data in a way that is appropriate for each device.

Synced or direct access to databases

It provides two ways of accessing data; one is to periodically import or sync data into the system's spatial database, which uses PostGIS, and the other is to directly access the data via a web service. It supports ESRI REST Services, which are used by ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise, and the industry standard OGC WMS and WFS web services, which are supported by all major geospatial vendors.

It does not support direct edit of spatial data, but does allow a GIS data correction requests to be routed through Maximo following Duke standard business procedure for making corrections.

It is flexible enough to support different business processes for collecting and organizing data. For example, pole inspections are conducted by circuit in what was Progress service territories and by square area in what was Duke's service territory.

Simplicity of use

Another of the key differentiators of Duke's web-based solution is that it is not targeted on GIS professionals, but on the 95% of people within Duke who can get a lot of value from a really simple Google Maps style interface onto their enterprise data.

Leading up to and during deployment Duke put on road shows, made web demos available online, utilized computer-based-training, and provided job-aid documents to make people aware of the new system.  The tool caught on surprisingly rapidly. Within five months of it being deployed there were 5000 users. Currently there are 8000 users with over 2000 users accessing it 24/7 every day.

Anticipated and unanticipated benefits

The major expected benefit that was realized by the system is that eases the integration of Duke and Progess. All GIS asset data is exposed through a single tool to designers and asset engineers. But there were some unanticipated benefits as well.  It has had a direct impact on tax calculation - it shortened the cycle for internal auditors to complete tax assessments.  It is also widely used during storms and other natural disasters. It enables crews from different area to use a familiar tool to analyze unfamiliar data in areas where they haven't been before.  It is used to provide driving directions for field crews.  Storm managers overlay outages, assets, flood plains, wind, rain, traffic  and other maps for situational assessment.  It allows manager to share staging sites during storms. It has also  proved extremely useful in locating "unmatched outages" - outages called in by first responders with just an address.

Process for choosing a vendor levels playing field for new entrants

Duke used an interesting process to select the vendor. Preliminary vendor interviews were conducted to exclude vendors that clearly didn't have a solution that could meet Duke's needs. Remote web demos provided a cheap and easy way to narrow down the list of vendors. A request for proposal (RFP) process was used to solicit technical-only proposals from product vendors. (Duke was only interested in off-the-shelf products not bespoke solutions.)  Duke picked the top five and asked them to come to Duke for a scripted demonstration. Instead of asking the vendors for a benchmark demonstrating how their product would address Duke's requirements using Duke data, they asked the vendors to demonstrate their product using their own data. They picked the top two vendors and began contract negotiations to decide on one vendor which turned out to be Ubisense MyWorld, a relatively new entrant in the geospatial world.  An important advantage of the selection process Duke used is that it made it possible for a relative newcomer to compete successfully with traditional GIS incumbents.

Electic power utility uses reality capture to rapidly develop grid data model

Duquesne Light is typical of many of North American small to medium electric power utilities.  It does not have an outage management system  or an electrical data model which means it is difficult to connect customers to transformers and to determine upstream devices when customers report power problems.  It has become clear to Duquesne Light that an electric data model is essential for moving forward on modernizing their grid. At Distributech 2018 Jim Karcher, Manager, Operation Technology Projects at Duquesne Light Co. (DLC), gave an overview of a remarkable project that compared different approaches including reality capture and a traditional foot survey for developing an electric grid data model.

Duquesne Light still uses paper tickets for tracking outages and other problems.  Currently Duquesne Light's circuit maps are AutoCAD drawings.  These drawings are designed to be used by electrical engineers and are not spatially correct.  The reliance on AutoCAD drawings means that  tracing from transformers to customers or from customers to controlling devices is a manual process.  However, Duquesne Light is moving to modernize its grid.  It  has implemented distribution SCADA (DSCADA) and has over 1100 DSCADA controlled field sectionalizers, about 400 DSCADA controlled field capacitors and is implementing an AMI deployment which will be completed in 2019.  And it plans to deploy and Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS) including outage management (OMS), DMS and DSCADA.  But the ADMS will require developing a complete distribution electrical data model.

A quarter of a century ago there were two ways to do this.  Either walk the entire network and plot it on a USGS map or attempt to conflate the AutoCAD drawings onto a USGS basemap.  Today's technology advances have created new alternatives.  One of these is to use modern reality capture, typically LiDAR and photo and infrared cameras with a GPS which can be mounted on a truck. 

To compare alternative ways to create a grid data model Duquesne Light decided to run a pilot on about four of its circuits comprising a 100 miles of its distribution grid.  Quantitative criteria were defined to allow comparison of cost, schedule, and electric data model accuracy of different approaches.  Electric data model accuracy included location accuracy, phasing, ability to trace customers to transformers, asset inventory and attribution.  The data model had to be captured in a form that was compatible with Duquesne Light's GIS.

Reality capture was done with a pickup truck with side mounted photo and IR cameras and LiDAR laser scanners.  Pictures were taken very second which enabled a 270 degree picture of each pole.  Location accuracy was about a meter.  To drive the entire 100m miles of distribution network required about a week.

When the model captured by reality capture was compare to the result of a traditional survey (on foot with a GPS), only one discrepancy was found that could be attributed to the reality capture approach.  Comparison with other approaches revealed that the reality capture data provided the most geospatially accurate asset location data.  The reality capture survey only required two Duquesne Light employees in the field for a week and at no time during the survey did they have to leave the truck - meaning that the survey was completed rapidly and safely.  Actual development of the data model was completed in the office without the necessity of going to the field for quality checks because the imagery provided all the data that was required to create and verify the data model.

Duquesne Light found several significant advantages of the reality capture approach.  The first was asset accuracy - both location and asset attributes.   Reality capture provided a visual record that could be checked in the office obviating the need to go to the field.  The captured imagery could be used for other purposes.  It could be used for a joint-use audit.  The LiDAR data allowed distances between poles and cables to buildings and structures to be accurately measured to ensure regulatory clearances and to verify third party attachment heights.  The infrared imagery could be used to detect hot spots.

This is critically important because it shows that reality capture is a feasible alternative to a traditional foot survey.  Duquesne Light has shown, based on a quantitative comparison of alternatives for developing a data model including a traditional foot survey, that reality capture provides a cost-effective and safe way to rapidly develop an accurate electric data model.  It also concluded that reality capture also provides significant additional benefits.

Avoiding a repeat of the CAD/GIS quaqmire of the past quarter century

Yesterday at Distributech 2018 in San Antonio I listened to a talk from a consulting company contracted by an electric power utility to clean up GIS data originally sourced from CAD drawings.  This reminded me once again that is a challenge that telecommunications and cable companies and electric and water utilities have been attempting to deal with at least since the early 1990s and for some even before that.  Telecommunications and cable and leading electric power utilities resolved this problem at least a decade ago, but for some electric power and even more water utilities it remains a problem that is going to hold these utilities back when they should be accelerating their adoption of digital technologies.

I began working in the utility and telecom sector in 1993, specifically in developing software for records management (called network documentation outside of North America), and at that time the magnitude of the AEC+geospatial cultural mismatch problem was just beginning to be appreciated by utilities and telecoms. In utilities and telecoms planners tend to use GIS tools, engineers and designers CAD tools, construction folks in the field paper CAD drawings, and asset managers GIS integrated with their FM tools. Fashioning AEC and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represented a challenge that remains a problem for utilities. The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from the very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data in a common workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

A workflow that is found at every utility and telecom involves the design-build-maintain information flow. The workflow begins with an engineer and drafter producing a design, typically a CAD drawing, which is printed for the construction contractor to use in building a facility. The contractor uses the drawing in the field and then returns it as an "as-built" to the utility's records management group, who enter it, traditionally by manually redigitizing it from the paper drawing, into a GIS that is intended to contain the digital twin of the network. The data in the GIS is used for network maintenance, outage management and other functions. The reason for the manual redigitization step is the "errors" that CAD drawings inevitably contain unless drafters are forced to adhere to "geospatial rules". This entire process is slow and error-prone and backlogs of as-builts waiting to be entered into the GIS stretch into months and even years. The result is that utility GIS data is more often than not incomplete, out-of-date, and unreliable. For example, at the beginning of the broadband revolution, telecoms needed to be able to tell customers whether they were close enough to a terminal and fiber to be eligible for ADSL. In one of the largest telecoms in the U.S. the GIS records were so incomplete and unreliable that survey teams had to be sent out at considerable cost to resurvey the location of their terminals and fiber cables.

Because there was no standards-based solution to the CAD+GIS problem, every utility and telecom has had to try to find its own solution to the problem. This problem has persisted from the 1990s and remains a problem for utilities - as I said I heard a presentation yesterday that wasn't that different from presentations on the same topic I and others gave a quarter of a century ago.

Over the years the poor CAD/GIS interoperability has cost the utility and telecom sectors considerable amounts of money. Large telecoms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to cleanup their GIS data and streamline their CAD+GIS workflows. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests this problem has cost directly and indirectly trillions of dollars over the past 20 years. In addition unreliable and out-of-date network infrastructure data that results from this problem has safety implications.  

The juncture between distinct sectors each with its own technologies and business models, AEC (Autodesk, Bentley, and others) and geospatial (ESRI, Hexagon, and others), has analogies with the clash of tectonic plates and the associated incessant seismic events. In the mid-1990s pressure from customers motivated Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of CAD and GIS, to attempt to collaborate to address the CAD+GIS problem. The result of the agreement between Jack Dangermond and Carol Bartz at the time resulted in an unsuccessful product called ArcCAD, which satisfied neither CAD nor GIS users.

Averting a tectonic clash repeat: BIM+geospatial interoperability

The prospect that, by analogy with CAD+GIS problem, we could still be individually finding solutions to BIM/geospatial integration 20 years from now is discouraging. While there are parallels between CAD/GIS and BIM/geospatial, there are grounds for optimism that this time around we may find ways the address the problem in a general way. Firstly, in the mid 1990s there were virtually no geospatial or 3D AEC data standards. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and builsingSmart were both only founded in 1994. It required quite a while for the OGC geospatial and buildingSmart's IFC standards to broadly penetrate industry and government.  Nowadays, there are many widely adopted geospatial standards; Simple Features for SQL, WMS, WFS, GML, KML, InfraGML, CityGML to name just a few from the OGC. buildingSmart's IFC standard is supported by all major BIM design tools including the market leader Revit.

Perhaps most significantly there has been significant progress in developing common conceptual models for geospatial and AEC views of city infrastructure. The major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016. The LandInfra conceptual model was developed by Bentley Systems, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International and provides a unifying basis for land and civil engineering standards including the OGC's InfraGML and buildingSmart International's IFC for infrastructure standards.  InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities. InfraGML supports a subset of the existing LandXML standard. buildingSmart International's IFC-Alignment project uses this common conceptual model of alignments for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges. The objectives of the IFC-Alignment project is to enable the exchange of alignment information through the full infrastructure lifecycle from planning through design and construction to asset management.

Secondly, in the 1990s and the early 2000s there were few open source geospatial projects. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) was only founded in 2006. Since then there has been rapid development of open source geospatial projects. There is enough open source geospatial code now that at the GEO|Design+BIM conference in Amsterdam, Sanghee Shin described a web-based geo-platform integrating massive, complex BIM models using open source geospatial libraries and tools including PostGIS, GeoServer, and Cesium and NASA WorldWind virtual globes. The importance of this project is that it shows that it is possible using the available open source geospatial APIs and libraries - together with some genuine innovative development - to create an open, non-proprietary, 3D geospatial platform for integrating geospatial and BIM. Given the critical importance of addressing the cultural and technical divide between the AEC and geospatial worlds, clearly many believe that a viable open source alternative will be essential for developing the innovative solutions to the challenge of interfacing the two worlds. 

Finally, major players in the AEC and geospatial industries, Autodesk and ESRI, have again agreed to collaborate. This time around they are probably more aware of the technical issues hindering BIM+geospatial integration. Both have adopted open standards when it made business sense - often under pressure from government clients - and both have also adopted open source technology where it made business sense. Together the combination of major players supporting the effort, standards organization like the OGC and buildingSmart already working to address the problem, and a broad range of open source code and a vibrant developer community may be enough to address the technical problems. If building and infrastructure owners and facilities managers including government as well as regulators become aware of the risk of not solving the problem, a solution may be found so that we will not be having the same BIM+geospatial integration discussion a quarter of a century from now.

Top construction company AECOM applies BIM + geospatial for full lifecycle projects

AECOM is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector.  It designs and builds infrastructure around the world for public- and private-sector clients including transportation, facilities, environmental, energy, oil and gas, water, high-rise buildings and government.  For eight years running it has been ranked #1 in Engineering News Record‘s “Top 500 Design Firms”.  I was very happily surprised at Geospatial World Forum 2018 to hear John Kizior, Global Director, Project Technologies describe how AECOM uses BIM + GIS on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) projects around the world.

A number of years ago, in a paper presented at a conference organised by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, a 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 construction industry.  Kemp wasn’t the first one to speak about this. The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time now and government mandated energy efficiency for buildings is a major driver of BIM/geospatial convergence.  A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector have realized that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance.  A leader in this space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch highway authority, began offering design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects a number of years ago which has motivated private Dutch engineering and construction companies to adopt an integrated geospatial + BIM approach for construction projects.  For example, the firm Royal BAM Group nv/BAM Infraconsult adopted integrated BIM + geospatial because of market developments including more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project.  As further evidence that the importance of integrating BIM and GIS is gaining recognition on the construction sector, Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of BIM and GIS, have announced an agreement to collaborate to help bridge the gap between BIM and 3D GIS.

At Geospatial World Forum in Hyderabad, John Kizior described several projects where AECOM realized the value of integrated BIM + GIS.   John emphasized that the concept of using BIM and GIS together is not new, but one of the reasons it has been slow to be adopted in the construction industry is that it "requires a lot of effort" (John's words).  With the recent focus on geospatial and BIM at AECOM, the discussion has shifted from CAD/BIM alone to include geospatial and its capabilities specifically for design, build finance and operate (DBFO) projects.   This mirrors the Dutch experience with design, build, finance and maintain (DBFM) projects encouraged by the Dutch highway authority.  AECOM has found that by adding real world coordinates they increase the value and types of data for all stakeholders across the entire lifecycle.  Integrated geospatial + BIM connects data types together. BIM holds the utility content and GIS is a visual platform for maintenance linked to a maintenance workflow.  AECOM has applied this approach to the external campus of Denver International Airport, and to lease management at Orlando, Hong Kong, and South West Florida international airports.  For the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD) in Hong Kong AECOM developed and maintains a central repository with district-wide data from various sources including all operational data - architectural planning and engineering- for the district.  The advantage of an integrated BIM+GIS approach based on a centralized integration of information is that it allows the client to make strategic decisions during the design, build and operate phases of the construction lifecycle.