Between the Poles

Major expansion in shareability of project information in construction

One of the challenges to the full expression of collaboration on construction projects is sharing information including geometry, properties, scans in the form of reality meshes, descriptions and status of equipment, and other information. In the dark ages of design information exchange was by paper.  At one time $2 billion of FedEx business was shipping paper drawings between project teams.  The next step was converting paper drawings to PDF files which enabled drawings and other information to be sent electronically rather than relying on FedEx.  But the data in PDF remains opaque to applications such as AutoCAD, Microstation, Revit, Microsoft Excel, and other applications which only know how to read application-specific DWG, DGN, RVT, or XLS files.  iModels are Bentley's way of packaging project information, in the form of application-readable file formats, in a container that can be shared with other project teams. There are iModel plugins for other vendors' products, such as Revit, for example, which enables rich data to be exchanged between Revit and Bentley BIM.

iModel Version 1.0, which is widely used as evidenced by the the number of submissions to the Be Inspired awards that uses it, comprises a collection of files. Each file is accessible to the application that created it, for example, Microstation or Revit, but not to others.

Yesterday in his keynote at the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) conference, Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley, announced iModel 2.0 and this morning Keith Bentley, who is the founder of Bentley, described what  iModel 2.0 is technically. It is no longer a collection of files, but a relational database. This enables all the information to be queried by all applications, not just the one that created the data.

Furthermore, Keith described iModelHub which adds data versioning making iModel 2.0 a versioned database which records changes in the data. iModelHub allows you to compare different versions to see what has changed. This is a powerful capability for construction projects which are constantly changing but which need to enable managers (and lawyers) to know what changed and when.

The is a very important advance which will allow much richer information to be shared by many applications. Additionally, iModelHub enables iModels to be shared via the cloud which dramatically expands accessibility to project information especially when used in conjunction with a collaboration enabler such as Bentley's ProjectWise.

Crowd behaviour modeling with BIM

I spent a fascinating day at the CanBIM Regional Session & Technology Exhibition in Toronto.  I was very impressed by how much things relating to BIM have progressed in Canada, which has generally lagged the countries spearheading BIM development, partly because of government inaction.

One of the most interesting presentations today was by Erin Morrow of Arup who talked about two pedestrian simulation products he has been responsible for developing, MassMotion and Flow.   These are 3D agent-based models.  They are based on real spaces with continuously connected 3D geometry and crowd interactions.  Agents have size and acceleration, personalities that prefer things like avoiding going up stairs.  They can dynamically assesses their environment and make routing decisions.  Social forces determine how agents respond to their environment, other people, and goals.  They try very hard not to hit obstacles or bump other agents.  Agents are able to make autonomous decisions based on this continuous space.  For example, MassMotion can simulate how agents will be behave when faced with a choice between a crowded elevator or empty stairs. 

There are also tools for assessing the result of a simulation including 3D dynamic visualization and various quantitative metrics such as density in various parts of the model, how long it takes people to get from one point to another, what route do most people take, flow rates through doors and up escalators, and and others.

The simulation tool defines portals, where people can enter or leave from, spaces where agents can go anywhere, connectors that connect rooms and other features.  Erin demonstrated live how to create a simple model with two rooms, connected by a door, with a portal where people entered and an exit portal.  He created a simulation where 100 people enter the first room every minute and visualized the crowd flow in 3D.  It was fascinating to watch how people bunched in front of one of the connecting doors and then the other.

The simulation geometry can be developed from scratch in MassMotion.  But for complex structures it is much simpler to import a BIM model (MassMotion imports IFC models from a variety of software including AutoCAD, Microstation, SketchUp, Rhino, and Revit. ) to create spaces and connectors including stairs and escalators.  Erin demonstrated doing this with a BIM model of an airport.  MassMotion was able to correctly identify 90% of the elements it recognizes such as rooms, doors, stairs and escalators.  In the demonstration some editing was required to make sure there was a continuous geometry.  For example, an escalator needed editing to logically connect to the upstairs floor. Then the user adds other information such as portals, sources where people come from, sinks where people go and rates of flow through the portals people enter from.  People may come from outdoors or train cars and they may be going to gates to catch planes.

The software has roles to play during design, during construction, and as a management tool throughout the lifespan of a building and surrounding areas.  It can be used operationally during construction to design alternate routes during construction.  The software was used to simulate passenger movements during a full day at the new Jetblue T5 terminal at JFK airport in New York with the objective of ensuring passenger comfort and fluidity of motion in the terminal.

There are many other applications used by engineers and planners including evacuation analysis.  One of the interesting results that Erin mentioned was that the Roman Coliseum built in 70 CE could be evacuated in 15 minutes, the same time it is estimated it takes to evacuate the recently built Olympic stadium (the Bird's Nest) in Beijing.

HxGN LIVE Precision mapping underground utilities with combined LiDAR and GPR

One of the most exciting presentations at the annual Hexagon conference HxGN Live in Anaheim from the viewpoint of practical application of new technology was a talk given by Gilbert Roulier of Grunder Ingenieure AG, who reported on a pilot project in Berne, Switzerland, to map underground utilities using combined mobile laser-scanning (mobile LiDAR) and ground penetrating radar (GPR). The objective of the pilot was to asses the capability of the equipment to capture in 3D culverts and water pipelines under streets in Berne with an accuracy of +/- 10 cm.

Equipment

The equipment used was a Leica Pegasus: Stream comprised of a Leica Pegasus:Two integrated with a Stream EM and towed by a vehicle.  One of the advantages of the Stream EM is that it is comprised of three antenna arrays - two for main line detection and one array for crossing line detection.  The Stream EM captures real-time tomography of the subsurface to about 4 meters in depth.  The combined LiDAR and GPR array can be towed at a speed of about 15 km/h.  In addition to capturing subsurface structures, the combined device also captured above ground structures.  Manholes and other visible surface infrastructure were used as ground control points.

After data capture there is a combined workflow that post processes the data captured by the Pegasus:Stream.  The final result is 3D data that can be imported into ArcGIS and AutoCAD.  As part of the pilot the data was compared to existing records and maps prepared showing the divergence.

Results and Benefits

The pilot revealed significant benefits from using combined LiDAR and GPR array.  First of all that the laser scanning and GPR equipment worked simultaneouly reduced traffic disruption.  It also dramatically improved productivity - up to 100 km could be captured and processed per day - including both above ground information about road structure and condition and below location of underground utilities in 3D.  An important advantage of the Stream EM array from a productivity perspective is that data collection was only required in one direction since the Stream EM array includes an array for transverse scanning of infrastructure crossing the direction of the scan.  An important advantage of the combined system is that it is capable of +/- 10 cm in locating underground infrastructure in 3D. Finally, the combined Pegasus: Stream array was much safer for the operator.  

From Grunder's perspective the pilot was successful and they report that they are seriously considering investing in the Pegasus:Stream.  Grunder sees the potential users of the combined system surveying companies and utility companies - both public and private.  It believes that the equipment could be used routinely for mapping of underground assets including pipe and cable detection and mapping, but also for road maintenance and renewal, subsurface cavity detection and in a modified form for ballast monitoring on rail lines.

Future

In his keynote at HxGN LIve Hexagon Geosystems President Juergen Dold made it clear that mapping digital realities above and below streets is a key technology for Hexagon Geosystems.  Very recently Hexagon announced the establishment of a georadar portfolio with three releases to provide applications in utility mapping, asset detection and mapping, and monitoring.  Included in the georadar portfolio is the Leica Pegasus:Stream which Hexagon sees as enabling mass digitization of infrastructure assets, such as telephone cabinets above and cable conduits below, by collecting data in less time without needing to stop traffic, increasing the safety of the road work crew.  They emphasize that the Pegasus:Stream has the potential to collect up to 100 km per day at 15 km/hr, providing digital documentation for GIS and CAD modelling.

I had an opportunity for a brief chat with Stuart Woods, Leica Geosystems Vice-President of Mobile Mapping, about Hexagon's plans for the Leica Pegasus: Stream.  According to Stuart Hexagon is planning to invest in the technology such as enhancements to the antenna arrays to increase the precision of the radar record.  They also intend to investigate translating the radar record into something more understandable like a point cloud.

Conclusion

The very exciting conclusion I draw from this is that the technology for underground remote sensing has finally gotten good enough that a major company sees an important market opportunity and is seriously investing in the technology and business of developing and manufacturing devices for detecting and mapping underground utilities. 

Automating the process of comparing digital models to reality

At the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in Houston I had the opportunity to chat with Nicolas Arnold, VP of Product Development at SKUR.  SKUR is a young software company that has just released its first product, which automates comparing a 3D digital model to reality as represented by a point cloud from terrestrial scanning technologies (typically LiDAR).  The scan can be of an existing structure or a new structure in construction. The variances are prioritized and can be inspected in an industry standard 3D visualization application.

Nicolas, SKUR provides technology that finds the differences between digital models and point clouds from scans.  What are some of the applications of this technology ?

We are in the business of comparing 3D building models with point clouds that are registered to the building model. We do this for two very specific use cases.

The first use case is what I refer to as construction QC.  Let's say you have a design model and during construction you capture a point cloud by laser scanning or some other technology.  What you are interested in is comparing the design model to what was actually built out in the field. To do this you simply upload the design file and the point cloud, specify three tolerances that are used to prioritize the differences between the model and point cloud, and then run our cloud-based application.  The application outputs colour-coded deviations, which you can visualize in Navisworks.

The second use case is what I refer to as model QC where you have the reverse situation.  Let's say there is an existing structure, a building or almost anything.  But there is no digital model and you need a model for a renovation or retrofit.  You can use a scan-to-BIM process to scan the building and generate a point cloud from which a model can be created.  The model creation could be done by your own people, by a third party provider, or by an automated process such as Clearedge.  In this use case what you are interested in is how  well the model fits with reality. You follow the same process, uploading the model and the point cloud, to compare the model to the point cloud to see where there might be modeling errors and other types of deviations.

These are the two use cases that SKUR serves. We target the sophisticated construction contractor (GC).  One application of the technology for a GC is to perform construction QC on their projects to look for problems.  Another application is pre-construction, when the GC is considering bidding on a renovation or retrofit project and wants to provide a digital model to the architect.  The GC wants to be confident that the model represents the structure accurately so he can tell the architect that the model is a reliable representation of reality. These are the folks that we are targeting for these two use cases.

Does SKUR provide data capture services ?

No, we are a software company.  If you are interested in this technology, you can create an account, it's up to you to capture the point cloud data however you want to do it, upload it onto our web-based system together with a digital model and then run our application.   You then download the variances and visualize them using an industry standard tool. We don't do any consulting.

I'm interested in how SKUR would be used during construction. What if the construction is only 10 % or 20 % complete, do I have to specify which part of the incomplete structure I have scanned ?

We have very smart algorithms that figure out which part of the structure to look at.  For example, if you bring us a point cloud of just the corner of a building and the model of the entire structure, we only focus on that corner of the building.  Another example is a building that is 12 stories high, but I only have a scan of the basement. Our software is smart enough to figure out the part of the model that relates to the scan.

What about the opposite case where during a scan-to-BIM process for an existing building, I have not finished the model so I only have a model for part of the building ?

It's basically the same algorithm. The software is smart enough to figure out which part of the scan relates to the partial model.  When you run our software, you simply upload the model and the point cloud and specify the tolerances.  The process is the same for construction QC or for model QC. From the perspective of the software, it's really the same thing.

Where does your software run, on a desktop or in the cloud ?

We are completely web-based, that is to say, cloud-based. Our software require heavy-duty processing that would not have been possible 5 years ago. It is all in the cloud and it's high performance multi-core computing.   We bring in the largest computers that are available on the Amazon cloud for these problems and they can generate the variances in a few hours.

What types of digital models do you support, 3D CAD, Revit, Bentley BIM, or IFC models ?

We are a young company, and we've just started.  Our first release supports 3D DWG models. But I think Revit models are the next logical step. And then we also plan to support the Bentley world.  The 3D DWG model really can be anything, with any level of complexity. I have had people asking me about things other than construction, like planes, such as an Airbus. I talked to a gentleman yesterday, who wants to use our software for a golf course.  As long as you have a DWG model and a point cloud that's registered to the DWG, we can find the variances between the two.  The registration between the two is critical. It has to be done accurately.

How difficult is it to choose the tolerances ?

It's very easy.  You choose three values corresponding to different degrees of variance which are colour coded, green, yellow, and red in the output.

How do you visualize the variances, I imagine for a large project there could be thousands of these ?

SKUR output is a visual representation and report of the detected locations where there are discrepancies showing the precise variance from design and, very importantly, the direction of the variance.  We colour code the discrepancies so you can spot the problem areas very rapidly. For example, in the graphic red and yellow coloring indicates degree of variance. Arrows show the direction of issue. In our experience most of the variances are green, so you can filter these out and just look at the ones colour-coded red, which are the big discrepancies.  This allows you to focus just on those important areas.  We're like an insurance company.  Most of the time it's fine, but when it's not you need to know.

Where did the algorithms come from  and where was the implementation done ?

We've invented everything from scratch in Oakland, California

I can imagine this technology being of tremendous value in many different sectors of the construction industry as well as in non-construction sectors.  Which sectors and geographies are you targeting as the market for your technology ?

The sector we have targeted so far are construction contractors (GCs). But going toward we will be increasingly focussing on owners.  We think that our software provides a view into the construction process that enables them to see during construction how well the designs by the architects and engineers compare to what is actually being built.

We are focussing on North America, but we also have clients in Europe. Europe is definitely high on our list, but as a young company we are focusing on close to home first.

If people want to try your software, how do they engage with you?

It's very simple. They sign up and create an account.  Then they can upload a model and a point clouds and hit the magic button. We do handholding in the beginning to help new customers.  But we don't do any data capture and or any data preparation. We simply provide a web-based software service.

SPAR 3D: Virtual reality, scan to BIM, infrastructure models, and mapping indoor spaces

I have just experienced two remarkable days at the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, in itself a remarkable location near Houston.  I will blog in more detail in the near future about the things and people I had the opportunity to experience over the past two days.

First of all, virtual reality.  Everyone is aware of the Oculus Rift (see the new review at CNET if you aren't).  There are other technologies that have come or are coming from Samsung, Sony and Google.  But at SPAR 3D the most remarkable VR technology I personally experienced was what David Smith, CTO of Wearaility, talked about and allowed me and others to try - a set of incredibly light-weight glasses with acrylic lenses designed to work with a smartphone that gives you a virtual experience comparable to IMAX without the IMAX theatre.  I tried it and found it an absolutely amazing surround experience.  And if you have wondered where Michael Jones, of Keyhole and Google Maps fame, has landed, he is now CEO of Wearality.

Secondly, my personal passion is the geolocation of underground utilities.  At SPAR 3D Mark Klusza, Founder & CTO, Real-time Metrology, Inc. described a major new advance in ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology he has developed that can detect a 3/4 inch rebar (among other things) four feet below the surface in clay.

For existing buildings creating a BIM model remains an art rather than science.  But at SPAR 3D a number of new technologies were presented that can help automate, improve the quality, and speed the process.  Foremost among them in my mind was presented by Nicolas Arnold, VP of Product Development, at SKUR.  With SKUR's technology, which runs in the cloud, you can compare the 3D model that you have developed with the point cloud you derived the model from and identify all the points of significant variance.  The same technology can also be used during a construction project to compare what has been built to what was designed - even when the building is only partially completed.

Ron Singh, Engineering Automation Manager/Chief of Surveys, Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) described progress on his remarkable vision of how automation is upending how we design, build and monitor, operate and maintain U.S. highway systems.  Richard Arrowsmith, Asset Information Group Team Leader, Highways England described the digital model of the English highway system.  Stan Burns, President, Integrated Inventory, who has just retired from Utah DoT, described Utah DoT's comprehensive database of every piece of highway furniture and signage in the Utah highway system.  Together these represent the future of the digitalization of national highway systems.

A new company, Indoor Reality, is the third startup of Dr Avideh Zakhor, who is on leave from the University of California Berkeley.  Her new device is a backpack loaded with sensors including lasers and infrared that enables you to map the interior of buildings by simply walking through a multi-floor building, including up and down stairs.  The resulting data can be used to automatically generate floor plans and 3D models and captures everything you need for an Energy Plus analysis.

Mark Shell and Darrell Gadberry, both of the City of Fort Worth Water Department, described a very versatile device with laser and sonar and camera devices on board that can be used for sewer line inspections of small and large diameter sewer pipes.  Fundamentally this device enables condition-based maintenance of municipal sewer systems.  Mark and Darrell reported that it has saved the Fort Worth Water Department $42 million.

I was able to interview Dr Avideh Zakhor, Nicolas Arnold, Ron Singh, Larry Kleinkemper of Lanmar Services who specialize in creating BIM models for existing buildings, and Greg Bentley of Bentley who has a broad, forward-looking perspective on the "digitalization" of infrastructure.

Convergence of BIM and geospatial contributes to better management of information

Dr Anne Kemp, Director and Fellow, Atkins, Vice-Chair of BuildingSmart, UK, Chair of ICE BIM Action Group, and Chair of BIM4Infrastructure UK, has published very thought-provoking insights into how the convergence of BIM and geospatial can contribute to the better management of information to help generate the understanding to make better decisions.

Her first assertion “So, let’s put paid to the hang-ups of what is and is not GIS and BIM, and discover what really deserves our focus” is a very good place for all of us to start if we are going to tear down the discipline boundaries that are inhibiting us from moving to a more holistic approach to problem solving in the era of smart cities.

Better outcomes, not BIM or geospatial

Her goal is not to support BIM or geospatial per se, but to use these technologies to improve outcomes.  From Anne's perspective the key outcomes we should be aiming at are

• CLARITY - Clarity of delivery
• TECHNICAL JUDGEMENT - Converging information production with sound engineering judgment and design
• ACCESS - Wider, faster access to comprehensible and integrated information
• LATERAL THINKING - Enabling reflective, adaptive thinking to incorporate whole life and integrated systems approach within the wider geographic context
• INNOVATION - Harnessing innovative technologies and harvesting intelligence from big data
• DECISIONS - Fostering instinctive, but rigorous collaboration and better decision making

Data, not documents

The construction industry is based on documents such as drawings. Documents lock data up within a discipline and prevents the wider access that can be used to build up an integrated view of an asset. In contrast digital data can be used, many times, for different purposes, by different disciplines.  This requires interoperability and the ability to map semantics across different disciplines.

Assets, not projects

The full lifecycle view of a building, road or airport requires thinking of assets not projects. Anne's perspective is that this is where the convergence of BIM with geospatial provides the biggest benefits. The UK government would agree. The short term objective of the UK Government BIM mandate is to reduce the cost of construction (design, tender, build) by 20%.  The longer term objective is by 2025 to reduce the costs associated with designing, building, operating and maintaining buildings and infrastructure by a third.  ‘In-use’ data from facilities management (FM) systems, building management  systems, and sensors including smart phones provides information on how an asset is actually serving the needs of people, and the patterns of behaviour of people using the infrastructure.  This information can be used to optimize building or infrastructure design. A geospatial perspective enables this data to be used not only with individual buildings or infrastructure, but for a whole neighbourhood, town or city.

Data ethics

Ensuring that data is not manipulated to distort decision making is critical to enabling the true data-driven organization of the future. Anne's perspective is that the industry is becoming increasingly dependent on data management professionals. This will require standards and a code of ethics to address challenges of privacy, distortion, and manipulation so as to ensure that data is made available in a way that aids rather than confuses decision making. In the future chief data officers and other information professionals will have even much greater responsibilities - they will be responsible for specifying, collecting, and analyzing the information for decision making that will be critical to the organization's success, even its existence.

Information is not understanding

Malcolm Gladwell in "Blink" points out that “We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

At a recent BIM conference the term “infobesity” came up more than once. A decade ago people were concerned about not having enough data to make informed decisions. Now that we have more data being collected by sensors such as smart meters and smart phones, the problem is how do we make sense from the huge volumes of data that all these smart devices are collecting.

Anne makes the point that when managed correctly, “instant” decisions based on a small amount of data are not just as good, but can be better than those made after analyzing all available data. The "less is more" challenge is to distill the data to just the right subset to enable you can make better decisions faster with less data. Anne believes that this will require more sophisticated visualization techniques to enable insights from patterns in large amounts of data and better collaboration technology to enable a large number of individuals from different disciplines to understand each other (even when using different terms for the same piece of equipment or construction material) and to collaborate fruitfully.

This means that we will be asking our human or computer information  engineers to deliver that essential subset of information to the right people at the right time, and in an intuitively understandable way.  Anne suggests that our cartographic and GIS heritage of creating, analyzing and visualizing a view of the physical world as maps may provide a model for future data managers.  But, as Anne points out, this will have to be transformed for a virtual environment.

Unintended consequences

Anne's final point is often overlooked. BIM, geospatial, augmented reality and other technologies are transforming how we view "reality".  There are very real consequences for people working in a virtual world. Anne mentions the first case of internet addition disorder (IAD) involving Google Glasses on October 14, 2014 and asks how many of us are already there with our smartphones and tablets ?

Multi-disciplinary interoperability standards for the convergence of BIM, 3D and geospatial

At the ISO/TC 59 Plenary Week in Toronto this week, a day long collaboration session was organized by ISO/TC 59, buildingSMART, and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).  This is a major milestone for the development of standards as a foundation for the convergence of building and civil engineering design and geospatial technology. 

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is an independent, non-governmental membership organization and the world’s largest developer of voluntary International Standards. ISO, which is made up of 165 member countries with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, has published more than 19 500 International Standards covering almost every industry, from technology, to food safety, to agriculture and health care.

BuildingSMART International (bSi) cooperates with ISO.  Specifically it has liaisons with two ISO committees; ISO/TC 59 (Buildings and civil engineering works) and ISO/TC 59/SC 13 (Organization of information about construction works).  BuildingSMART's main standard Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), which is a standard for sharing BIM in the construction and facility management industries, was adopted as an official ISO standard in 2013 as ISO 16739:2013.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) develops publicly available geospatial interface standards. OGC Standards enable interoperable location-aware solutions for the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT.  Over the years, the OGC has been building a network of alliance partner organisations, many of whom are standards development organizations in market domains related to the built environment.  One of these alliances is with buildingSMART which has an official memorandum of understanding (MOU) with OGC to co-operate. Recently the joint effort has focused on using BIM for Infrastructure and requirements for interoperability between BIM and Geospatial domains.

In 2008/2009 the AECOO-1 Testbed, which was led by the Open Geospatial Consortium  and the buildingSMART alliance, looked at streamlining interoperable communications between parties in the conceptual design phase to get an early understanding of the tradeoffs between construction cost and energy efficiency. Major achievements from the AECOO Testbed include delivery of BIM through open web services (OWS) for multi-disciplinary interative design analysis in real time. [George Percivall personal communication]

In 2012 the OGC, BuildingSMART International, ISO TC 211 and ISOTC 59/SC 13 began discussing ways of cooperating to support harmonization. A Civil Summit held in Waltham, Massachusetts (USA) and Abu Dhabi was organised cooperatively by bSi and OGC.  Since then several domain working groups (DWGs) have been formed to identify gaps and work toward cross-disciplinary standards.  For example, The OGC 3DIM Domain Working Group (DWG) works jointly with ISO TC 59 and buildingSMART to facilitate the definition and development of interface and encoding standards that enable software solutions that allow infrastructure owners, builders, emergency responders, community planners, and the traveling public to better manage and navigate complex built environments.

Geospatial domain working groups (DWGs)

At the ISO/TC 59 Plenary Week Leif Granholm of Trimble gave a quick but comprehensive overview of the work of the three geospatial domain working groups (DWG) in which all three standards groups are involved.  

3D Information Management (3DIM) DWG

3DIM, which used to be called CAD/GIS DWG, is involved in some areas of 3D interoperability that are creating the foundation for moving forward in the direction of modeling entire cities.  These include CityGML, which with extensions can model most of the above ground features of cities excluding inside buildings, augmented reality markup language (ARML), 3D  portrayal, and a first start at a successor to LandXML (which is an orphan right now) called InfraGML, and Indoor Geographic Markup Language (IndoorGML).

IndoorGML

One of the most important initiatives is IndoorGML.  Leif Granholm and others foresee that this may be the "the next big thing", as important for navigating indoor spaces as GPS was for outdoors.  Anyone with a mobile phone with a GPS or a GPS in their car is familiar with how easy it is to navigate anywhere on the planet - as long as it's not in a building.

There are two dimensions to this challenge.  The first is finding a technology analogous to GPS for assigning an XYZ location to people and things in buildings.  For example, in a hospital it is often urgent to be able to determine instantly where Dr Morgan is and where the nearest "crash cart" is.  In a mall it is important for a shopper to know where he or she is at any given instant, where whatever they are looking for is, and how to navigate between the two.  Determining where you are in a building is a technical challenge that is still getting a lot of attention from researchers.
 
The other dimension is context, typically represented by a 3D model of the interior spaces of buildings.  This can show context for shoppers to direct them to whatever they are looking for.  For a maintenance person, it is also necessary to be able to dissolve walls, ceilings, and floors to expose the building's infrastructure, electrical, fire, water, HVAC, and so on.  IndoorGML is intended the provide a standard for modeling indoor spaces.  But it is a more complicated problem.  Compared to outdoors there is a hundred times more data indoors.  Outdoors there are a relatively small number of data providers; national mapping agencies, national space agencies, commercial data providers like Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Nokia, TomTom and volunteered data like OpenStreetMap, and so on.  Indoors there are likely to be hundreds of thousands of data providers.  Just as every firm nowadays develops its own web site, many foresee that every firm will develop its own 3D presence and map of its space, for example, to enhance its attractiveness to customers navigating their way around the mall using a 3D map.  IndoorGML provides a standard that will enable this to happen.

The first version of IndoorGML was approved a week ago.

CityGML 3

Development of the next version of CityGML is just ramping up.  But unlike the standards development process used in the past which relied on sharing Microsoft Word documents and wikis, CityGML3 will be developed using a novel approach that was successfuly used for developing the GeoPackage standard.  One of the major innovations from an OGC perspective of the GeoPackage standard development process was achieved by putting the GeoPackage specification out on GitHub, which made it much more accessible to the developer community than if it had been made available in the traditional OGC way. 

The other innovation that CityGML3 will benefit from is a modular approach to standards development. CityGML 3 is actually comprised of 10 sub projects rather than one mega project.

Urban Planning DWG

This is a brand new DWG.  Its objective is to identify the gaps and to facilitate the development of standards to enable interoperability between smart city applications.  Technologies and trends such as Augmented Reality (AR), Smart Cities, Smart Grids, Sensor Webs, the Internet of Things (IoT), LBS (Location Based Services), Facilities Management, navigation (indoor and outdoor) and “Big Data” Analytics all can play important roles in informing urban planners.  In these technology domains, open standards can facilitate the development, publication, discovery, and use of information. The OGC Urban Planning DWG intends to discover requirements for open geospatial standards in information systems involved in the planning, design, use, maintenance and governance of publicly accessible spaces. The DWG already has plans for an OGC Smart City Testbed focused on urban resilience and in 2015 an OGC Smart City pilot.

Land and Infrastructure DWG

A major project for this DWG is to develop a standard called InfraGML for exchanging information relating to highways and roads.  By way of background, LandXML is a widely used standard supported by almost 800 members in the roads and highway transportation sector.  A number of years ago an unsuccessful attempt had been made to make LandXML compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Geography Markup Language (GML) standard for geospatial data.

The immediate issue is that LandXML, which is not associated with a recognized international standards organization, has been unsupported for over five years.  To address this issue the Land and Infrastructure DWG chartered a LandInfraSWG (Standards Working Group) for LandXML. Its first activity was to reverse-engineer a UML model and documentation (which were lacking) for LandXML 1.2 as a basis for assessing the viability of supporting LandXML as an OGC interoperability standard. A number of deficiencies relative to the OGC baseline were identified.  The LandInfraSWG has proposed developing a new standard, dubbed InfraGML, that will encompass a subset of LandXML functionality, be defined by a UML conceptual model, would incorporate GML and most importantly for the future, would be supported by the OGC.

CityGML and IFC common data model

Another very interesting project with important implication for the future of geospatial-BIM convergence is creating a conceptual model of road alignments that will be used in both OGC and buildingSMART standards for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges. This is particularly challenging, but extremely important because it is a first step in developing full lifecyle models for infrastructure from planning through design and construction to operate and maintain.  OGC focuses on planning and operation whereas design and construction are buildingSMART’s focus area.

Oracle Database Cloud Service supports Spatial

At Oracle Open World in San Francisco 2014, September 28–October 2 the Oracle Spatial and Graph SIG held a Meetup.  By way of background Oracle Spatial and Graph support geospatial data and analytics for land management and GIS, mobile location services, sales territory management, transportation, LiDAR analysis and location-enabled Business Intelligence. The graph features include RDF graphs for applications ranging from semantic data integration to social network analysis to linked open data and network graphs used in transportation, utilities, energy and telcos and drive-time analysis for sales and marketing applications.  

There were several very interesting discussions at the Meetup that revealed some interesting aspects of Oracle Spatial itselef and its interoperability with other products such as ESRI ArcGIS, Autodesk Map3D, and Bentley.  These are taken from a summary recorded by Nick Salem moderator of the Meetup.

The Meetup was attended by about 20 users came from industries such as rail, local city government, national land management agencies, and defense. The SIG Board and members of the Oracle Spatial product development team joined up with them in the Oracle Technology Network Lounge.

Some of the most interesting discussion topics include new features in Oracle Spatial 12c and real world experience interoperating Oracle Spatial with CAD and GIS products from other vendors.

• Oracle’s new Database Cloud Service offering now includes Spatial. 
• A new Oracle Spatial 12c SDO_POINTINPOLYGON function can be used to ingest large point datasets (point clouds) without the overhead of creating a spatial index.
• Bechtel has developed a way to use ESRI ArcGIS versioning with Oracle Workspace Manager (OWM).  They have developed in-house custom tools to usefeature-level metadata to be able to retrieve spatial content from their project and public spatial databases, as well as to compile the revision history of layers in the database to retrieve maps impacted by changes to individual features.
• Dan Geringer, Oracle Spatial Solutions Architect, advised that other large enterprises have also successfully implemented OWM with ESRI ArcGIS.
• Bulk processing and interoperability are two of the important advantages of Oracle Spatial for enterprises. Bechtel has large project-based deployments of Autodesk and Bentley CAD systems, and has worked with Autodesk in recent years to successfully write spatial data to their Enterprise GIS Oracle Spatial database from Autodesk Map 3D. They also have developed a GIS Desktop Procedure that details the required Autodesk client software configuration for Oracle Spatial and ESRI ArcSDE database connections. They will be updating it for use with Autodesk 2014 and 2015 clients.
• Latest version of MapViewer (11.1.1.7) supports HTML5 and JSon and the ability to work in disconnected mode. Standalone, web-based vector editing is also available. Wish Li and Jayant Sharma demonstrated  MapViewer on mobile devices, an Android phone and an iPad.

 

The point cloud is the model at Volvo

At the SPAR International Conference in Colorado Springs this morning Magnus Rönnäng, ‎Technical Expert in Virtual Manufacturing at Volvo Car Group gave a fascinating presentation on how Volvo has transformed the modeling of their automobile assembly plant using laser scanning.

 

Volvo is different from many other car manufacturers in having a single assembly line that is driven by customer orders (just-in-time manufacturing). Volvo makes 10 models and at any given time several of these models will be moving down the line.

 

When they introduce a new model, they can't afford to shut down the assembly line.  What they do is simulate in 3D how the new model will progress down the line. Until several years ago they simulated the assembly line using 3D CAD, but just the assembly line not the rest of the plant.   That led to problems because they couldn't determine from the simulation whether there was enough room outside of the assembly line to manipulate a new part or assembly.  To resolve these issues they needed a model of the entire plant.

 

In 1999 they tried to model the entire plant using 3D CAD. By the time they completed the model, the plant had changed so much that the model was out of date. They tried to do this several times again with the same result.  Then they decided to try laser scanning which turned out to be the solution. They laser scanned the entire plant.  It took 2500 scans and generated 80 billion points.  But they didn't convert or reverse engineer the point cloud - the point cloud was the digital model of the plant.  They abandoned trying to use 3D CAD for modeling the plant, and continued to use it only for the vehicles themselves and other movable and moving equipment.

 

The key to keeping the model up to date in a very dynamic ‎plant environment is incremental scanning which allowed them to update only part of the point cloud model of the plant. This technique allowed them to scan new equipment installations and renovations and replace only part of the point cloud model.

 

Volvo uses commercial software that allows them to simulate a vehicle represented by a 3D CAD model moving th‎rough the point cloud of the assembly line and the plant looking for any collisions, basically a dynamic clash  detection algorithm.  They also use 3D visualization software to demonstrate to non-technical staff in management and on the Board of Directors how a new model moves through the assembly line.

"Design in context" breaks down the barriers between geospatial and design

At the Middle East Geospatial Forum in Dubai, Richard Humphrey, Senior Director at Autodesk, gave a vision of the future entitled The Future of Geo-enabled Design that captures at a high level where the convergence of geospatial and engineering design is headed.

Over the next two decades the total investment in infrastructure is estimated to be somewhere in the range of $20 to 50 trillion.  A lot of this money is going to have to come from the private sector because governments are increasingly spending their money on services and less on capital projects.  To attract private investment will require governments to provide for decent financial returns and reduced risk.  A major challenge face by many developed economies including the U.S., Japan, the E.U. and Korea that productivity in the construction industry has been static or declining for the past few decades.  As  a recent McKinsey report has pointed out there are a number of areas where productivity can be improved in the construction industry, but it will require investment in technology.

Infrastructure projects are big and getting bigger.  60% of these projects fail.  The either exceed their budget or their schedule or both.  Some of the reasons for this is information silos (CAD, GIS, BIM, etc), huge volumes of data (tens of thousands of design drawings, terabytes of point clouds and imagery, billions of tweets, etc), and the difficulty of coordinating large virtual teams.  Also increasingly stakeholders who are not architects, engineers or GIS analysts need to be involved in the design process, whether it is a new transmission line, substation,  bridge, or subway, municipal government, the public, environmental review agencies, regulators, and others impacted by the project are involved in the design process because they need to influence how it is going to impact them and their constituency.

Rich Humphrey described what he calls design in context which is enabled by the convergence of and breaking down of barriers between geospatial and engineering design and relies on big data, 3D visualization and web technologies.

Fundamentally it means using BIM or BIM for infrastructure to design a new structure in situ, using a city model to represent the rest of the city.  The data generated in large infrastructure projects together with the city model can become huge so this requires big data technology.  For example, Rich mentioned a Chicago model that is comprised of 800,000 buildings.  The concept also makes possible analytics (for example, energy and water performance analysis, line of sight analysis for traffic signs) that require information about prevailing weather patterns and neighbouring structures (for example, right to light in the UK).  And it also aims at automating design optimization based on defined design goals.  It is web-based to allow access for large extended virtual teams.  It uses 3D visualization technology and simplified ways of interacting with the design to enable all the stakeholders, including non-technical folks,  to actively participate in the design process.

The goals are improved productivity, optimized designs, and greater predictability for large infrastructure projects, all of which are required if we are going to attract the tens of trillions of private investment dollars that it is estimated we need to invest in our infrastructure.