Between the Poles

Latest statistics reveal little progress in reducing damage to underground infrastructure during construction

The primary objective of interventions such as one-call centres, pipeline safety and other regulations, and national programs such as ROADIC in Japan is the reduction of damage to underground infrastructure during excavation. Collecting reliable statistics make it possible to assess the effectiveness of policies, technologies and changes in business practices aimed at preventing and reducing the severity of underground utility damage incidents.

Background

While many jurisdictions have attempted to address the problem of damage to underground infrastructure during construction, reliable statistics remains a challenge for many jurisdictions. In North America the Common Ground Alliance (CGA) has been collecting voluntarily submitted statistics on underground utility damage in North America since 2003. For trends over time the Common Ground Alliance (CGA) breaks out incidents that are reported by "consistently reporting sources" which are sources that have reported incidents over multiple years. The ratio of this metric to a proxy for the annual amount of construction activity has revealed that number of incidents of damages per million dollars of construction spending (in 2017 constant dollars) has been increasing.

With respect to federally regulated gas and hazardous fluid pipelines In the U.S. it is mandatory to report incidents of pipeline damage to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Adinistration (PHMSA). PHMSA has implemented policies and regulations to improve pipeline safety. PHMSA’s statistics have not revealed a trend toward a reduction in pipeline incidents including those attributed to excavation damage.

Common Ground Alliance 2019 DIRT Report

The CGA has just released the 2019 DIRT Report.  The report found that damages to underground infrastructure during excavation are on the rise.The number of damage reports entered in the CGA's DIRT system reached an all-time high at 534,151. The estimate of total damages in the U.S. increased 4.5% year-over-year to 532,000.  A key metric relied on by the CGA to track temporal trends is ratio of damages to construction spending. The overall trend in this metric has been upward since 2015. In 2019 estimated damages were up 4.5% compared to 2018. It is suggested that the rise in damages may correlate with an increase in overall pressure on the damage prevention process.

For 2019 alone, the CGA has estimated that the societal costs of damages to buried utilities in the U.S. is $30 billion.This estimate accounts for direct costs (facility repair) and indirect costs (property damage, medical bills, businesses unable to operate, etc.).

Ontario Regional Common Ground Alliance 2019 DIRT Report

The Ontario Regional Common Ground Alliance (ORCGA) has been collecting voluntarily submitted data on underground damage incidents since 2005. While some would argue that this represents only 50% of actual incidents, this is the best compilation of data on underground utility damage in Ontario.  It is relied on by Ontario One Call for measuring performance toward its legislated goal of reducing underground utility damage.  Recently the ORCGA released the 2019 DIRT report for Ontario.

In Ontario industry practice is to measure damage prevention performance by the damage ratio metric which represents the number of damage incidents per thousand notifications. Notifications are tickets transmitted from Ontario One Call to underground infrastructure owners in response to a request from an excavator for locating underground facilities. Since 2014 the damage ratio has been gradually increasing. Due to a change in the Ontario One Call process in 2018, notifications in 2019 decreased which affected the damage ratio.

In response to the Ontario One Call process changes, a chart was created to show a new metric, the damage to request ratio, which shows the number of damage incidents per 1000 requests.  A request is a communication from an excavator, typically via Ontario One Call, for locating underground facilities.  Since 2018 this ratio has slowly decreased.

KLIC system in the Netherlands

The Netherlands has had what in North America is called a one call system since 1967. The objective of the KLIC system is to prevent damages to the utility network and to ensure the safety of excavators during excavations. In 2010 the Netherlands switched to an online digital information system (KLIC-Online) that reduced the turnaround time for locate requests to less than 24 hours. 

In the Netherlands network operators are required to report all incidents of damage to their infrastructure including location, cause and other information.  Based on this and other information the Dutch Telecom Agency (Agentschap Telecom) issues an annual report with statistics on underground utility damage in the Netherlands. The metric comparing the number of requests for location information from excavators (blue bars) to the number of incidents of damage during excavation (red line) shows that this ratio has remained constant since 2015.

Conclusion

The latest statistics from the CGA, ORCGA and the KLIC system confirm what has been seen in previous years.  The trend in damage to underground infrastructure prorated to construction activity is flat or even increasing. The CGA's estimate of the impact of underground damage on the U.S. economy of $30 billion annually makes it clear what the economic benefits of a more comprehensive approach to reducing damage to underground infrastructure could be.

Geospatial+BIM are a major contributor transforming construction

Geospatial and BIM have been identified as key technologies in the digital transformation of the global construction sector which has been underperforming for decades.  A recent report estimates the size of the contribution of geospatial+BIM technologies to the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector.

The $10 trillion global construction industry is facing a crisis. For many of the world's advanced economies including Japan, Germany, U.S., South Korea, and U.K. construction productivity has been stagnant or even declining for decades. Virtually all of the funding for infrastructure was sourced from government who were looking for a social return on the investment. Since the mid 2000s, an increasing proportion of investment in infrastructure has come from private sources; pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds which together manage over $60 trillion. These sources of investment are expecting a financial return and that is driving a growing investment in construction technology to improve productivity. A McKinsey report, Imagining construction’s digital future, presents data that shows that large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile. The report finds that construction has been slow to adopt process and technological innovations. R&D spending in construction lags other industries. Construction R&D is less than 1% of total industry revenue compared to 3.5-4.5 % in the auto and aerospace sectors. A McKinsey Global Institute study compared the degree of digitalization of nearly 30 industries and concluded that construction ranked right at the bottom with hunting.

But there are signs of a change. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure through 2030 to keep up with global GDP growth. This is a massive incentive for the construction industry to transform productivity and project delivery through new technologies and improved practices.Venture capital investment in technology startups in the construction sector is growing. 2018 was an inflection point with venture capital investment in the construction sector quadrupling. Two of the technology sectors that McKinsey & Company suggest will be key in the digital transformation of construction are geospatial and BIM.

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

A recent study by Geospatial Media Analysis, GeoBIM Market in AEC Industry: Technology Trends, Value Propositions, Market Size, Readiness Index, and Maturity Model, has estimated the market size of geospatial+BIM technology in the global AEC sector which contributes about US$11 trillion to the global GDP.  It is estimated that the cumulative geospatial industry's value in the AEC sector is US$71.28 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach US$117.59 by 2023. The cumulative BIM market size is estimated to be US$7.9 billion in 2019 and growing at a CAGR of 11.06%.  The impact of geospatial+BIM technolgies on construction are significant.  For example, it is estimated that geospatial+BIM solutions reduce average design time by 22.2% contributing to overall savings of 5.9% on small scale construction projects. For large scale construction projects GEOBIM solutions are estimated to contribute approximately 13.1 % in overall project savings.

To make the key GEOBIM technologies concrete the report describes a GEOBIM Maturity Model that makes it possible to evaluate and assess the ability of an AEC firm to operate in an integrated geospatial+BIM environment. The GEOBIM Maturity Model extends across the entire construction lifecycle from planning, through design and construction to operations and maintenance.  The levels of the GEOBIM Maturity Model increase as more innovation takes place in digital GEOBIM technology and the importance of the integration of geospatial and BIM technologies is recognized. For example, for surveying traditional theodolite and chain is characteristic of Level 0 in the maturity model.  As more modern digital technologies are adopted levels rise; total stations (Level 1), laser scanning and GNSS, (Level 2) to mobile scanning, drones, ground penetrating radar and other underground locating and mapping technologies (Level 3).  For planning and design, the increasing use of digital technologies compared to drawings and paper maps (Level 0), include CAD and digital maps (Level 1), BIM and 3D point clouds (Level 2) to digital twins of both above and below ground infrastructure and mixed reality (Level 3). For construction, traditional constuction machinery and paper drawings are being replaced by BIM models, digital geospatial maps and automated construction with GNSS, and prefab and additive building.

A survey of the Facilities Management (FM) industry found that while 92% had heard about BIM and 84% agreed that BIM has the potential to deliver value add to FM, over two thirds said that the FM is not prepared for BIM. Evidence suggests that full lifecyle construction including FM is gaining traction in the construction industry. As owners see the advantages full-lifecycle thinking for construction projects and are beginning to changing their procurement practices, construction companies are changing their business processes to optimize facility maintenance and operation. Construction companies that have taken on the challenge of design, build, operate and maintain projects are realizing that there are significant benefits from an integrated BIM+geospatial approach to full lifecycle construction.

In conclusion real world data and analytics are now revealing the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.

Thank you to Ananya Narain for bringing the GEOBIM Market in AEC Industry report to my attention.

Initiative to develop open standards for AEC and geospatial interoperability

The effects of population growth, urbanization and climate change are motivating us to contemplate serious changes in how we build and maintain buildings and infrastructure. This change will require new tools. There are important industry drivers that suggest that AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial interoperability is one of them. A specific challenge currently facing the AEC and geospatial industries is integrating building information models (BIM) and geospatial infrastructure models for full life-cycle project workflows. Autodesk and ESRI have announced a partnership to further the integration of AEC and geospatial models and data which is already showing tangible results, but in a proprietary environment. A recent paper by the Integrated Digital Built Environment (IDBE) joint working group working group, a collaborative effort by buildingSMART International (bSI) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to further open standards for AEC/geospatial interoperability, has identified the conceptual and other incompatibilities between the geospatial and AEC modeling of built infrastructure and suggested a way forward toward addressing incompatibilities.

Clashing tectonic plates

The BIM+geospatial problem is the latest symptom of a broader problem. 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. The Between The Poles blog is nearly 15 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 ). 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 continues to be a challenge.

There are parallels between what happened in the 1990s in unsuccessfully addressing CAD+GIS interoperability and the current challenge of BIM+geospatial interoperability. But there are also important differences which provide grounds for optimism that the availability of open standards for both BIM and geospatial, a vibrant open source geospatial community, and a new willingness on the part of major software players in the BIM and geospatial industries will make it possible to successfully address the latest interoperability challenge facing the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial industries.

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

Research in the Netherlands at the Delft University of Technology delved into interoperable digital building and infrastructure model standards developed to serve the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial sectors. Specifically, the research was focused on translating the geometry and topology of 3D digital BIM models represented in buildingSMART's Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard into 3D forms compatible with the Open Geospatial Consortium's CityGML standard. The researchers found is that there is more than one way to transform a BIM model to CityGML. While it was possible to transform most BIM models, it is not possible to convert all BIM models to CityGML.  The findings of this research has reemphasized the challenge of integrating AEC and geospatial data, the first major industrial symptom of which appeared over 25 years ago in the form of 2D integration of CAD and GIS.

Comparison of IFC, CityGML, and LandInfra

The IDBE working group is a joint collaboration between buildingSMART and the OGC.  Among the first products of IDBE is a paper Built environment data standards and their integration: an analysis of IFC, CityGML and LandInfra that described the incompatibilities and similarities among three open standards used in the AEC and geospatial worlds.

The three standards are IFC (Industry Foundation Classes), developed by bSI, is used predominantly for exchange of rich, fine-scale building and infrastructure data in the AEC industry, CityGML, an OGC standard, for capturing large scale urban data including buildings and transportation infrastructure originally for simulations, and LandInfra, jointly developed by bSI and OGC, for modelling land and civil engineering infrastructure facilities and designed as a successor to LandXML.

An important difference among the standards is how real-world objects are conceptualized.  IFC represents a building as an aggregation of building elements such as walls, doors, and windows, CityGML represents internal building volumes as rooms, and LandInfra represents buildings as features of a facility with only an outer shape and footprint.

Another important difference is coordinate systems. IFC uses a rectilinear coordinate system to represent structures in engineering precision over relatively small, flat surfaces.  CityGML and LandInfra model structures that need to take into account the Earth's curvature and therefore use an appropriate geographic projection system.

The standards use different geometric representations of objects.  CAD and BIM design tools use splines, nurbs, spirals and many other parametrized forms.  Geospatial applications generally use points and multi-point lines and polygons.

Topological relationships are also handled differently. In CityGML, topologies such as containment or spatial adjacency are represented implicitly in the boundaries between different geometric objects.  IFC defines objects and their geometries and separately and explicitly identifies topological relationships between them.

Level of Detail and Level of Development (LOD) are handled differently.  CityGML uses LOD to progressively define more detailed representations of a structure. For example, for a house; LOD 0 is a building footprint; LOD1, a 3D volume; LOD 2 includes a 3D roof geometry, LOD 3, windows and doors, and LOD 4 detailed structures and furniture. Levels of Development in BIM refer to levels of progress through a construction project and does not correspond to LODs in CityGML. There is no concept of LOD in LandInfra.

Conclusion

The consequence of these differences among the standards is that software interoperability and data integration are difficult.  Three approaches to resolving this interoperability challenge have been proposed.

• Schema mapping: This approach attempts to map each object in one standard to be mapped onto its nearest match in another standard.  The TU Delft research described earlier investigated this approach and concluded that unambiguous mappings between CityGM and IFC was not possible in all cases.
  
• Federation: Another approach is to support multiple schemas in one representation.  For example, a Revit BIM model can be displayed in a geospatial environment.This limits the generality of some operations such as spatial search, spatial analytics, and CAD and BIM operations.
  
• Link referencing: A third approach is a linked federation using embedding links in the primary model to components from instances of secondary schemas. The feasibility of such an approach was confirmed in OGC Testbed 4 (2007), in which web services were used for 'merging' CAD, GIS and BIM data.

Next steps

The IDBE has made several recommendations for moving forward to resolve the latest AEC/geospatial interoperability challenge in an open, standards-based way.

• Identify and prioritize uses cases.
• Compile a shared vocabulary and a shared resource for identifying synonyms across different domains.  An example of the latter is the CB-NL developed in the Netherland for mapping synonyms across the construction life-cycle.
• Develop a best practice document for coordinate systems for 3D georeferencing.
• Devise a system of common unique identifiers (Oids) for real-world, physical objects that remain
  constant and unique.
• Collaborative approach for harmonizing conceptual models.
  

I would add that owners of buildings and infrastructure, recognizing that an important benefit of open interoperability standards is increased competition among software vendors, should consider ways that open standards are incorporated into their procurement requirements.  Government procurement was a major driver that motivated virtually all BIM tool vendors to incorporate IFC support into their products.

Geospatial + BIM interoperability essential for the development of smart cities

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Autodesk signals commitment to BIM + geospatial integration for improving construction productivity

We are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer tangible evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.  A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector realized a number of years ago that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance.  Recently Autodesk, arguably the market leader in BIM design software, has been signaling its commitment to geospatial + BIM integration, joining other firms in the construction software industry in improving construction workflows involving BIM and geospatial data and applications.

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.  Fashioning AEC and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance has been an ongoing challenge for owners for decades.  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 into efficient workflows (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector realized a number of years ago that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance. It has been shown 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 procurement space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch transportation 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 to construction. 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.   AECOM, which is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector and has been ranked for eight years running it has been ranked #1 in Engineering News Record‘s “Top 500 Design Firms”, uses BIM + GIS on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) projects including the external campus of Denver International Airport, and to lease management at Orlando, Hong Kong, and South West Florida international airports.

Major firms in the construction software industry such as Hexagon, Trimble, and Bentley have integrated geospatial + BIM to varying degrees in their approach to construction for years.  For example, Bentley decided fifteen years ago to support real-world coordinate systems in all of their products including Microstation. Bentley calls this capability geo-coordination and it provides a location-aware foundation which facilitates workflows that require integrated engineering and geospatial data and applications. According to Bentley geo-coordination adds value for asset performance with a very high return on that investment.  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 2019 iForte Solusi Infotek presented concrete benefits of a records management system integrating CAD and geospatial worklows that has been in operation for several years for managing their fiber optic networks in Jakarta and on the rest of Java. 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, and there were a number of intangible other benefits.

Over a year ago Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost announced a partnership to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies.  I have reviewed the technical progress that the two companies have made in furthering interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds which suggests that the new relationship between Autodesk and ESRI appears to be being translated into concrete actions. 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. 

Further evidence of a serious commitment to furthering efficient integrated BIM and geospatial workflows is provided in a recent article in Geospatial World by Nicolas Mangon, Vice President of AEC, Business Strategy & Marketing at Autodesk, has acknowledged that "there is a growing recognition in the collective AEC industry that geography provides a common language for collaborating on projects." Furthermore, "bringing GIS technologies and BIM processes together provides a broader and deeper understanding of infrastructure in the larger context of the built and natural environment by integrating information and content."  Expanding on the recently announced Autodesk and ESRI partnership, Mangon says that "Autodesk is bringing that knowledge from manufacturing to AEC and our ESRI partnership allows us to improve the way we create spatially accurate digtial representations of the physical. Our current plan is to expand the integration further into our detailed design applications like Civil3D but also connect GIS data into out cloud BIM platform."   This is an important statement from the market leader in BIM software and suggests that the days when architects, engineers, and construction contractors work with an isolated 0,0 coordinate system are numbered.

This is another signal from a major player in the BIM design space of a serious commitment to overcoming the BIM/geospatial integration challenge and ending the decades long clash of tectonic plates between the AEC and geospatial worlds that has contributed to low productivity in construction, utilities, telecommunications and other industries.  It will also an important first step toward the development of maintainable near real-time digital twins of urban infrastructure.

Machine learning cost-efficiently creates high quality utility GIS data for smart grid applications

Many utilities' GIS contains only a small part of what is required for managing a smart grid.  Often even the data in the GIS is too unreliable to use for smart grid applications.  For example, utility GISs may not include which customers are connected to which transformer, or if they do include this information it is incomplete or incorrect.  Many utility GISs cannot identify the phase(s) each customer is using and they may not include network topology - what is connected to what.  Other missing data may includes street lights, distributed energy generation such as rooftop PV panels, the type and condition of poles, joint use of poles, and encroachment.  To correct these problems typically requires a foot survey which is expensive.  For example, a pole inventory costs at least $20 per pole.  At the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Energy Summit at EPRI in Charlotte, John Simmins of EPRI described the research he is leading at EPRI to use modern technology including machine learning to reduce this cost to pennies per pole using available imagery such as Google Streetview.

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 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 FM, GIS or integrated 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.  For many utilities the backlog of as-builts and updates waiting to be entered into the GIS stretches into months, with the result that GIS data is permanently out of date inhibiting management and field staff from relying on this data operationally.  The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from its very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data in a common workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

There are signs that modern technology is beginning to offer a solution to the problem of developing and maintaining an accurate digital model of electric power grids.

I wrote recently about a utility in western Pennsylvania that intends to implement an Advanced Distribution Systems ( ), but realized that to this requires a network data model. Duquesne Light is typical of many 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.  Currently Duquesne Light's circuit maps are AutoCAD drawings.  Duquesne Light is moving to modernize its grid and plans to deploy an Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS) including outage management (OMS), DMS and DSCADA.  But the ADMS will require developing a complete distribution electrical data model and to that in the traditional way can be expensive.

To quickly, safely and cost efficiently develop a network data model, Duquesne Light looked at several alternatives including reality capture technology.  A pickup truck was equipped with with side mounted photo and IR cameras and LiDAR laser scanners. The reality capture survey could be completed rapidly and safely, with no boots on the pavement  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.  In addition the captured imagery could also be used for other purposes.  For example, it could be used for a joint-use audit.

But this is still basically a manual process requiring a human being to scan images.  At the Energy Summit John Simmins described his research using neural network technology to automatically identify poles and attached equipment from available imagery such as Google Streetview.  Normally applying neural networks requires large quantities of training data.  To reduce this requirement, John has evaluated "biologically inspired", forward pass, neural networks.  In this approach the algorithm first looks (foveates) for vertical things that have the characteristics of a pole, and then for the characteristics of equipment attached to the pole, for example, cross members, street lights, transformers and large cables.  From this analysis is possible to determine pole location, height and width, cross member position on the pole and projected length, street light support strut position and length, position of transformer and large cable connection locations.  The ultimate goal of the research is in addition to automatically detecting each element of equipment to identify the type, size and manufacturer of each piece.

This is not a simple problem and there is no silver bullet.  Using a standard neural network approach requires large volumes of training data.  For poles it requires images of poles with different types of damage under different lighting conditions and in different types of weather.  An Australian company SiteSee claims to be able to do this for communications towers and transmission pylons - identifying the type and manufacturer of each antenna or insulator on a tower or pylon and comparing it to the manufacturer's specification to detect signs of corrosion and other types of damage.  When what you are looking for has a distinctive geometry that differentiates it from the surroundings, a biologically inspired approach may provide a way of identifying equipment without large volumes of training data.  Another area where several different approaches have been applied to automate feature extraction is electric power transmission lines for vegetation management.

Creating a digital twin of an electric grid is essential for developing and maintaining a smart grid.  Utilities have been wrestling with this challenge for decades and in many cases their GIS data is still not much closer to what is required.  If it would be possible to use the technology that John Simmins is investigating or other technology to reduce the cost of improving the quality of their GIS data, it would accelerate the adoption of smart grid technology at many utilities.  In his presentation at the Energy Summit Jared Green described his research in using smart meter and AMI network data to map secondaries from the transformer to the home, identify sources of unmetered load, and use impedance data from smart devices to correct utility GIS data.  Given the history of the challenge to develop and maintain accurate GIS data at many utilities, these approaches represent a beacon of hope which may enable utilities to cost effectively develop a digital twin of their networks that is an essential prerequisite for a  smart grid.

Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction

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

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure through 2030 to keep up with global GDP growth. This is a massive incentive for the  construction industry to transform productivity and project delivery through new technologies and improved practices.  McKinsey reports that large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile.  Construction has been slow to adopt process and technological innovations. R&D spending in construction lags most other industries - construction R&D  is less than 1% of total industry revenue compared to 3.5-4.5 % in the auto and aerospace sectors.  McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption and two of the technologies that it believes will be key in that anticipated transformation are geospatial and BIM. 

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model will be during operations and maintenance, which typically represents 80% of the cost of a facility.  Companies who take on design, build, and maintain and/or operate projects find significant benefits from a full lifecycle BIM + geospatial strategy. For example, EllisDon in Canada considers BIM+geospatial as best practice for its PPP projects, Rijkswaterstaat pioneered design, build, finance, and maintain (DBFM) projects in the Netherlands, Crossrail, which is currently the largest engineering project in Europe, has adopted this approach, Malaysian firm PESTECH International Berhad employs this approach for build, operate and transmit (BOT) projects, and major U.S. construction firm AECOM is applying BIM+geospatial on large design, build finance and operate (DBFO) projects. But to date there has been little reported quantitative evidence supporting the benefits of this approach.  This is changing with several projects providing estimates of benefits including ROI of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction projects.

Integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction

On many projects information provided by the construction contractor is handed over months after completion of the project. It can take the operator of the facility a year to go through this information to find the information required to operate the facility. This period is what is called the "blind spot" corresponding to the time the facility operator is managing the facility with limited information. Since for many types of equipment the highest probability of failure is in their first month or two of operation - just during the period that the building operator often doesn't have access to information about warranties and extended warranties - this increases the risk of equipment and even facility failures. In addition there is a cost associated with just finding the information required to service equipment. A NIST study across several industries estimated that the cost associated with this is 23 cents/square foot which adds considerable cost to operating the facility.

A full lifecycle facilities information flow starts with a facilities information specification from the owner identifying the building information to be included as part of the final deliverables at the time of commissioning.  The facilities information specification is part of the contract between the owner and the designers and contractors who will construct the building.  The facilities information required by the owner's specification are entered into the BIM database during design and construction by the designers and contractors.  At the completion of construction the facilities information data collected by the designers and contractors and stored with the BIM model in digital form represents a key deliverable to the owner together with the BIM model.   The facilities information can then be used to populate the building manager's asset management/facilities management system database including links to the BIM model of the facility to identify where each element or piece of equipment can be found. Most of the spatial and non-spatial data collected during construction is useful during operations. 100 % of floor plans and most of the 3D model (geometry and associated data) are needed in operations. Some owners find that just the BIM model including geometry and associated data is adequate for managing the facility. Others augment the BIM model by a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) which adds financial, occupancy, maintenance history and other information.

In an award winning paper at a 2011 conference organized by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century.  The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time.

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 transportation 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 to construction.

A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector realized a number of years ago that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance.  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. 

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

Benefits of Integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle construction

Recently, Microdesk has reported case studies including hospitals, a medical research facility, an airport and a university. For each facility several use cases were included in the ROI analysis.  For example, dealing with plumbing leaks, electric power shutdowns, passing on tribal knowledge from senior staff to new hires, and conducting infectious risk assessment (ICRA/PCRA), and so on.  After introducing BIM models for facilities and asset management, FM staff were surveyed and asked whether they found dealing with a plumbing leak, for example, using BIM easier, the same or more difficult than the traditional approach. The analysis quantified the time required to resolve a plumbing leak before and after the introduction of BIM.

Two very interesting examples of the ROI analysis performed by Microdesk relate to maintenance operations in a hospital. Passing tribal knowledge on from the older generation of FM staff to the younger involves a junior FM staffer accompanying a senior staff member walking the building for about a month. This requires about 200 hours of staff time. The hospital hires about 12 people per year so this amounts to 2400 hours per year. With BIM and virtual reality (VR) this was reduced to 22 hrs per person, a very significant staff time savings.  In another example, a review of infectious risk assessment (ICRA/PCRA) analysis in a hospital takes about 152 hrs and this has to be repeated 200 times per year. With BIM the time required to conduct these analysis was reduced to 74 hrs per review saving 15,600 hrs annually.

At the conclusion of five years running on the projects, the ROI analysis found a positive BIM in all cases, and estimated that introducing BIM for FM saved on average 5 % of operating costs per annum. It was estimated that introducing BIM reduced the time looking for things by 83% of the 23 cents per square foot cost for doing this from the NIST study. Since operations and maintenance are roughly 75% of the total cost of a facility, these results represents a substantial savings over the full lifecycle of a building.

The Napgur Metro, which is a US$1.3 billion project underway in Nagpur, is the first project in Asia to integrate a digital twin with an asset management system to eliminate information loss about assets during design and construction.   A 23 digit asset code was used to link 3D models developed using Bentley BIM tools with SAP financial management making it possible to track assets right from design through to operation and maintenance. BIM best practices followed the British PAS 1192 guidelines. Since the Nagpur system implements a full-lifecycle approach to project management, the location of each of the 500,000 assets comprising the systems is recorded making it possible to click on an asset in SAP and be shown the location of the asset in a 3D map.  Final deliverables are digital models rather than paper drawings providing a basis for digitalizing operations and maintenance.  The benefits of a 3D BIM+geospatial approach have been projected based on a 25 year lifetime for the project.  It is estimated that this will result in US$400,000 savings during plan, design and build, a reduction in operating manpower requirements by 20%, and increased availability and reliability.  The really big payoff is an estimated savings of US$222 million over the lifetime of the project.

 

PESTECH International Berhad, the winner of a Year in Infrastructure award, used geocoordinated digital design for the development of a new substation Kratie and Kampong Cham, Cambodia.  The decision to use geocordinated design technology for this project was partially motivated by the requirement that the company would not only be responsible for designing and building the substation but also for operating it for a period of 25 years before transferring it to the utility.

 

A number of projects in the Netherlands have been initiated by Rijkswaterstaat (RWS), the Dutch highway authority, using a design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) approach. The Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) board is convinced of the benefits of BIM and BIM/geospatial integration and rolled out BIM/geospatial for four DBFM projects with the intention to require BIM on all DBFM-contracts in the future. Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult was responsible for several of these projects.  A DBFM project at BAM starts with 2D geographic data that is visualized through a GIS web portal. The web portal gives everyone on the team an early perspective on the project site including underground utilities and aboveground structures before design begins. During the tender process the geospatial data is combined with 3D data including 3D representations of nearby natural and man-made features as well as proposed designs to create a 3D environment for assessing alternative designs. The 3D environment improves collaboration among the team members as well as enabling better communication with the client through 3D visualization of proposed designs. After award, the first step is conducting LiDAR scans of the site/proposed route. At completion of construction, the data collected during design and construction is migrated to an integrated GIS + asset management system system to support maintenance activities. 

 

In Canada public–private partnership (P3) have been remarkably successful for building and maintaining infrastructure. For EllisDon, a major construction and building services company, integrated BIM + geospatial is considered best practices on full lifecycle projects P3 projects in Canada.  EllisDon was involved in its first P3 project in Canada fifteen years ago. Since then the P3 business has grown and now P3 is a big part of EllisDon's business. For P3 projects EllisDon builds a wide variety types of structures including hospitals. In the P3 world the contractor often shares the risk of operating and/or maintaining a facility for an extended period. This means that people who are going to be running and managing a facility need to be involved in designing the facility right from the beginning. It is necessary to cost out the lifecycle of each piece of equipment whether it be a carpet, baseboard or cooling unit because you have to be able to maintain it and at the end of the 30 year period you are expected to turn over a hospital that looks brand new. For this reason P3 projects are very different from design+build projects.

 

AECOM, which is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector and has been ranked for eight years running it has been ranked #1 in Engineering News Record‘s “Top 500 Design Firms”, uses BIM + GIS on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) projects around the world.  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.

BIM+geospatial interoperability

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 owners.  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 ). It is indicative of the importance of the integration of BIM and geospatial data and technologies that Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of AEC and GIS, have announced an agreement (for the second time) to collaborate to help bridge the gap between CAD/BIM and GIS/geospatial. 

 

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

 

The Netherlands has led in the development and application of open BIM+geospatial standards‎ in the construction industry. The Netherlands has created a BIM Gateway that is intended to be a national portal for information about open BIM standards including related geospatial standards. 

In the AEC world Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) are the open and neutral data format standard for the exchange of building information models (BIM) that is widely used in the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction)  sector.  The IFC standard was developed and is supported by buildingSMART International.   The IFC BIM standard is used in the construction industry in many countries and is mandated in countries such as Finland.  The first versions of IFC were intended for buildings (vertical BIM).  Recently buildingSMART initiated the IFC for Infrastructure project to extend the IFC standard to support linear transportation infrastructure (horizontal BIM or BIM for Infrastructure) such as rail, road, bridges, and tunnels. 

In the geospatial world a widely used international geospatial standard for cities is CityGML.  Thomas Kolbe and co-workers are the developers of the CityGML standard that has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium.  Kolbe et al. are translating a vision of the city as an interactive system comprised of functional components, utility networks connecting components, and interdependencies between utility networks into standards-based intelligent models that can be used to analyze urban environments for a variety of purposes including risk- and disaster management energy consumption, carbon balancing and city life-cycle management.

Currently CityGML includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance for urban environments. CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions, called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs).  There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains.  For example,  I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks.  The INSPIRE Data Specifications Annex III contains use case encodings and a data model for Buildings the development of which was strongly influenced by CityGML. There have been attempts to integrate or at least develop a mapping between IFC and CityGML. 

A 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.  LandInfra  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.  

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 lifecyle from planning through design and construction to asset management. On the geospatial side  InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities.

Open source support for AEC/geospatial interoperability

Where there are recognized open standards, there are more often then not open source projects supporting those standards.  mago3D is a new open source 3D geo-platform.  It is open source and integrates many well-known open source geospatial products and APis.  The importance of this technology is that it shows that it is possible using the available open source, geospatial APis and tools - 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, a viable open source alternative is essential for developing the innovative solutions to the challenge of interfacing the two worlds. 

Bentley has announced that it intends to build its products supporting digital twins around an open source project already on Github called iModel.js.  Bentley is committing its resources to developing an ecosystem around iModel.js. To quote Keith Bentley this is a huge change in direction for Bentley although Bentley had puts its toes in the open source water previously.  Bentley used open source geospatial components to develop a new front-end for its leading road and rail asset management system AssetWise Lifecycle Information Management solution (ALIM).  Bentley has also partnered with AGI to support the open source Cesium project.

Conclusion

As owners see the advantages of design, build, operate and/or maintain projects and are beginning to changing their procurement practices, construction companies are changing their  business processes to optimize facility maintenance and operation.  Construction companies that have taken on the challenge of design, build, operate and maintain projects are realizing that there are significant benefits from an integrated BIM+geospatial approach to full lifecycle construction.   The advantages of an integrated BIM+geospatial approach have remained for the most part company internal.  Now it appears that the word is getting out.  Standards organizations in both the AEC and geospatial worlds are making progress on BIM+geospatial interoperability.  Major software vendors Autodesk and ESRI have announced an agreement to partner for greater interoperability between their products.  The open source community is also addressing the issue of BIM+geospatial interoperability. We are now beginning to see data from real world projects that offer quantitative evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.

3D BIM + geospatial full lifecycle metro rail project aims at eliminating data loss

This year's winner of a special recognition award at Year in Infrastructure was Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation Ltd for its Nagpur Metro Asset Information Management System which implemented a digital twin and a tagging scheme right from design with the goal of eliminating information loss over the life-cycle of the project.  It is estimated that this will save US$ 222 million over the 25 years of operation of the metro rail system.

 

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital twin, estimated at more than 40% savings, will be during operations and maintenance, typically representing 80% of the total cost of a facility.  Companies such as BAM who do Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) projects report significant benefits from full lifecycle BIM + geospatial.  But there is little if any quantitative evidence supporting this conjecture.  I have asked people from Finland familiar with the very early BIM developments in that country if there were studies of the benefits of BIM for operations and maintenance, but apparently the BIM focus there has been entirely on design and build.   Crossrail with a budget of £14.8 billion is the biggest engineering project in Europe.  The most interesting aspect of the Crossrail project is a 3D digital twin that has not only been used during design and construction, but is intended to be used for operations and maintenance.  Crossrail appears to be one of the first major projects that may be able to provide support for the conjecture that the biggest benefits of BIM + geospatial are for operations and maintenance. 

 

One of the first quantitative estimates of the benefits of a 3D BIM+geospatial full lifecycle project strategy I have seen was offered by this year's a winner of a special recognition award at Bentley's Year in Infrastructure in London.  Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation Ltd's Nagpur Metro Asset Information Management System has implemented a digital twin and a tagging scheme right from design with the goal of eliminating information loss over the life-cycle of the project.

 

The Napgur Metro is a US$1.3 billion project underway in Nagpur, a city of 3.5 million in the Indian state of Maharashtra.  This is the first project in Asia to integrate a digital twin with an asset management system to eliminate information loss about assets during design and construction.   A 23 digit asset code was used to link 3D models developed using Bentley BIM tools with SAP financial management making it possible to track assets right from design through to operation and maintenance. BIM best practices followed the British PAS 1192 guidelines. Since the Nagpur system implements a full-lifecycle approach to project management, the location of each of the 500,000 assets comprising the systems is recorded making it possible to click on an asset in SAP and be shown the location of the asset in a 3D map. QR codes are used to track different versions of drawings. Final deliverables are digital models (Bentley iModels) rather than paper drawings providing a basis for digitalizing operations and maintenance.

 

The benefits of a 3D BIM+geospatial approach have been projected based on a 25 year lifetime for the project.  It is expected that this will result in US$400,000 savings during plan, design and build, a reduction in operating manpower requirements by 20%, and increased availability and reliability.  The really big payoff is an estimated savings of US$222 million over the lifetime of the project. 

 

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

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.