Between the Poles

BIM and reality modeling eliminate change orders for brownfield substation expansion

Companies are recognizing the benefits of an integrated geospatial and building information modeling (BIM) approach to design and construction. At Bentley‘s the Year in Infrastructure 2018 Conference in London, the winner of the Year in Infrastructure award in the Utilities Transmission and Distribution category applied BIM processes and reality modeling on a brownfield substation expansion project. The integrated approach enabled the organization to cut design time, minimize site visits, reduce land requirement and material waste, and, most importantly, eliminate change orders during construction.

This year's award winner, Pestech International Berhad, applied reality modeling and 3D modeling in the expansion of an existing substation located in a rapidly growing industrial area close to the largest airport and port in Malaysia. This was a brownfield project that involved adding 500-kilovolt capacity to an existing 275/132-kilovolt substation. 

Substation design requires coordination between multiple disciplines, including site preparation, electrical design, mechanical design, protection design, and communications design. Traditionally, substation design involves a waterfall information flow consisting of CAD drawings and paper documents among the various disciplines. It is characterized by time-consuming, error-prone manual processes that make it difficult to correct errors, change designs, and keep everyone current with the latest documents. For a brownfield project, substation design also requires frequent visits to the site, which is hazardous and time-consuming. As a result of this fractured process, multiple submissions of the design are typically submitted to the client because of design errors. Often, the land area required for the site is overestimated and the bill of materials, which is generated manually in a time-consuming and unreliable process, results in material shortages during construction.

By automating the design process, the design time to complete the electrical drawings could be reduced from five to six months to one to two months. The bill of materials, which could require weeks to months to complete manually, could be generated instantaneously with much greater precision, reducing material waste and avoiding material shortages during construction. Clash detection could be automated, making it possible to detect clashes during design. For a brownfield project, compatibility with the existing structure can be ensured with the reality mesh, thus avoiding site visits. The combined reality and BIM model represented a single source of truth enabling all disciplines to stay current. In contrast to a waterfall information flow, a centralized 3D model enables different disciplines to work in parallel. The most important project benefit is that design errors could be detected and eliminated during design, rather than during construction. As a result, there were no rework orders due to design errors.

Reality modeling is the key technology contributing to this advancement. Reality modeling is the convergence of reality capture using 3D technologies, point clouds from LiDAR, and generating reality meshes from point clouds and digital photographs with BIM design. Geolocation plays a key role in integrating these technologies. Bentley calls this process geocoordination, and it makes it very simple to integrate data from diverse reality capture sources as well as to reuse existing engineering data together with 3D BIM design models. As I have blogged about previously, integrated geospatial and BIM is essential for a full lifecycle approach for managing infrastructure assets. 

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

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

ESRI and Autodesk partnership

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

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

Integrating BIM and CAD with GIS

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

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

Integrating GIS with civil workflows

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

Integrating civil and geospatial workflows with BIM

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

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

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

IoT platform for integrating two decades of Hexagon's technology acquisitions announced at HxGNLIve

In May of last year Hexagon acquired a company based in Alpharetta, Georgia called Catavolt that combines internet of things (IoT), analytics and mobility. At HxGNLIve in Las Vegas Ola Rollén in his exhilarating opening keynote - beginning with incredible graphics showing every foot of a young gosling's 400 foot fall down a cliff (which happily it survived) and ending with an incredible slalom ahead of an avalanche punctuated with the skier executing a back flip - announced its new name Xalt and showed a unique example of what it is capable of.  Xalt runs in the cloud on Amazon Web Services and collects data from sensors, which could be a metrology (measuring) device, an Oracle database or SAP. It then analyzes the input stream looking for outliers and raises an alarm that causes something else to happen. It could be informing a human that there is a problem or it could be linking to another machine. In the example that Ola showed a measuring device could be seen measuring the precision of what a robot did and when the precision became worse than a threshold, it raised an alert which caused the robot to recalibrate itself.  Another example of what the Xalt platform is capable of was demonstrated on the exhibition floor where we were invited to develop an app in seven minutes that integrated data from several different sources. The development platform was a laptop and the resulting app ran on an iPad.

Xalt is an internet of things platform supporting many different sensors and types of sensors, big data analytics and different clients especially smart phones. Xalt supports multiple AI data sources including imagery, video and big data for applications such as predictive maintenance, change and anomaly detection. The platform monitors, senses and acts on all connected data inputs in real time. It accesses sensors from remote locations and utilizes the data to optimize business processes. It includes AI capabilities including deep learning with digital neural networks. From Ola's presentation it is clear it is not intended as a standalone product but rather as a platform that integrates the many and disparate devices and systems that Hexagon has acquired since Hexagon began its incredible journey in 2000 from a Swedish contract metals manufacturer and producer of valves, antennas and pressure vessels to a global geolocation and measurement, design and construction application and visualization technology company with $4.11 billion in revenue and 18,315 employees in 2017. During these nearly two decades Hexagon acquired 64 companies many with geospatial capabilities including Leica Geosystems in 2005 and Intergraph in 2010. The big question for observers of Hexagon's meteoric rise has been how was it to integrate these disparate acquisitions into a synergistic whole that is bigger than its component parts.  It is clear from Ola's keynote that Xalt will be the foundation for Hexagon's big leap to achieve this.

National digital twin is key to the UK government's transformation of the construction industry

The conjunction of the release of three UK government reports, Industrial Strategy Building A Britiain Fir for the Future, Transforming Infrastructure Performance, and Data for the Public Good, has set the stage for a transformation in how infrastructure is built, managed and operated in the UK. National digital twin is now a key concept for the UK government and BIM and geospatial are foundational for this digital replica of the national physical infrastructure.

Mark Enzer, chief technology officer at Mott MacDonald UK and proposed chair of the Digital Framework Task Group (DFTG) which is tasked to drive these reports’ implementation forward in his keynote at Geo Business 2018 in London, explained that there will be a greater focus on existing infrastructure.  Digital abundance where the cost of everything digital has dropped dramatically over the last couple of decades has transformed many industries from banks to airlines automobile manufacturing. Construction represents about 10 % of GDP and construction productivity has plateaued over the past 40 years whereas general industrial productivity has doubled. Mark pointed out that the UK has primarily mature infrastructure to maintain and operate and construction has to change to reflect this.

Based on the concept that data in the form of a national digital twin is just as important as physical assets, digital delivery and physical delivery go hand in hand. Key to digital delivery are BIM, geospatial, a common data environment, and asset information management.  A national digital twin would include above and below ground assets.

Managing this data is about making sense of it for better decision making. Fundamental to this process is rethinking value, not just the value of a finished building or infrastructure asset, but output per ‎£ over the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset. This means moving beyond BIM Level 2 to full lifecycle BIM including operate and maintain.

A coordinated digital transformation landscape is required to achieve this digital transformation strategy for economic transformation. He sees the many organization in the UK infrastructure and construction sector coalescing around ICG, representing Highways England, Network Rail, Crossrail, Highspeed Rail 2 (HS2), Heathrow Airport and others and Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) representing the UK BIM Alliance and others to enable this to happen.  The Centre for Digital Built Britain is a partnership between the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and the University of Cambridge to deliver a smart digital economy for infrastructure and construction for the future and transform the UK construction industry’s approach to the way the UK plans, builds, maintains and uses its social and economic infrastructure.

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

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

A number of years ago, in a paper presented at a conference organised by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, a design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial -- or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century construction industry.  Kemp wasn’t the first one to speak about this. The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time now and government mandated energy efficiency for buildings is a major driver of BIM/geospatial convergence.  A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector have realized that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance.  A leader in this space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch highway authority, began offering design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects a number of years ago which has motivated private Dutch engineering and construction companies to adopt an integrated geospatial + BIM approach for construction projects.  For example, the firm Royal BAM Group nv/BAM Infraconsult adopted integrated BIM + geospatial because of market developments including more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project.  As further evidence that the importance of integrating BIM and GIS is gaining recognition on the construction sector, Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of BIM and GIS, have announced an agreement to collaborate to help bridge the gap between BIM and 3D GIS.

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

An open source web-based platform for integrating BIM and 3D geospatial

BIM+geospatial integration is being driven by a trend toward infrastructure construction projects that require maintenance and/or operations during an extended period post-construction.  At the GEO|Design+BIM conference in Amsterdam, Sanghee Shin, CEO of Gaia3D Inc., gave a riveting presentation about a web-based geo-platform integrating massive, complex BIM models using open source geospatial libraries and tools including PostGIS, GeoServer, and Cesium and NASA WorldWind virtual globes.

Drivers of BIM+geospatial integration

Since the world became aware of the importance of human impact on the environment, it has become increasingly difficult to design buildings without reference to geographic context.  Many cities have environmental zoning and other types of by-laws that require designers to take into account neighboring buildings, infrastructure and vegetation.  States and national governments are developing building codes that require designers to assess the energy, water, emissions, and other environmental impacts of buildings.  This means that when designing and constructing a building or renovating existing buildings, the traditional approach ( often associated with a 0,0 coordinate system ) of design in isolation is no longer adequate for sustainable design.

Furthermore integrated geospatial+BIM is essential during the operations and maintenance phase of a building.  Utilities, transportation, emergency planning, first-responder access, energy performance, and evacuation management all require information about internal and external infrastructure.  A common geospatial coordinate system enables a comprehensive operational view of all infrastructure including internal and external structures. 

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.  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.

It is indicative of the importance of the integration of these technologies that Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of BIM and GIS, have announced an agreement to collaborate to help bridge the gap between BIM and 3D GIS.  This is their seond attempt.  The first attempt, an agreement between Jack Dangermond and Carol Bartz in the mid 90s, resulted in a product called ArcCAD, intended for civil engineers and planners.

An open source geo-platform for integrating BIM+geospatial

mago3D is a new 3D geo-platform developed by Gaia3D.  It is open source and integrates many well-known open source geospatial products and APis. It is web-based so it is not necessary to install anything to run it. It has an engine for handling massive, complex BIM objects based on an internal format (F4D) that was created to reduce network data traffic, enable LOD (level of detail) control, support octrees, a 3D spatial structure that enables efficient spatial queries and (frustrum and occultation) culling.  Culling refers to the removal of objects that are not visible to the observer and is key to efficient visualization or large, complex structures. It integrates with two of the best known open source 3D virtual globe tools, Cesium (supported by AGI and Bentley) and NASA WorldWind, for visualization in a geospatial context.  Viewing BIM structures in mago3D has some similarities with a Google Earth experience. The source code is available under Apache and AGPL (Affero GPL) open source licenses.  Cesium is an open source project supported by AGI and Bentley.

mago3D includes a F4D Converter that converts BIM models in IFC (buildingSmart Industry Foundation Classes) format as well as 3D objects in .3ds (Autodesk 3ds Max), .obj (Alias/Wavefront) and .dae (Collada) formats into its internal F4D format.  Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is a vendor neutral and open model that most industry software BIM tools including Revit and Tekla are able to export, although there is typically some information loss. The bimserver.org open source project provides an open repository of IFC models and offers a Java API to extract partial building information models from a repository.

The main components of mago3D are mago3D.js, a javascript plug-in for WebGL virtual globes and open source web server (NGiNX), map server (GeoServer), geospatially-enabled database (PostgreSQL+PostGIS), 2D mapping (OpenLayers, Leaflet) and 3D visualization (Cesium or NASA WorldWind). The mago3d.js javascript plugin is designed to run in a WebGL virtual globe environment in a browser so that moving/rotating objects such as BIM models and heading adjustment happen in-browser and are very fast. 

I went to the mago3D site and viewed a BIM model of a chemical manufacturing facility in South Korea.  I was impressed with the ability to zoom ala Google Earth from the entire virtual globe down to viewing the chemical facility in its geospatial context.  I could continue down to a very detailed, almost nuts and bolts, level showing that the LoD control and the octree-based culling algorithms make visualization very efficient, even for large complex objects.

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. 

The other part of the solution is common, open standards. There has been encouraging progress on that front.  The major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016.  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.  

Intriguing new technology developments for improving construction productivity

Throughout media day at the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) conference I was on the edge of my chair because there were such tanatalizing hints of spatial technologies that might address major challenges of 21st Century construction. We were inundated with a phenomenal amount of information about new technology developments and by examples of how these developments are actually being used by customers in the real world.  It is breathtaking to experience how rapidly new technology is being developed, rolled out and applied in the real world. This is happening in diverse disciplines as evidenced by the projects nominated for the roughly 20 different domains that are broken out for Be Inspired Awards categories at YII2017.

Today's presentations and the latest press releases absolutely intrigued me and I was tantalized by what I heard. The presentations stimulated many questions about the new technologies that Bentley was developing and I was very relieved to be able to sit down and chat with Francois Valois, Senior Director of Software Development Reality Modeling at Be‎ntley. Real world experience has shown that reality modeling is relevant to every part of the construction lifecycle. As a result reality modeling has grown rapidly in importance at Bentley and now has its own software development group. It joins four other groups which reflect the construction business cycle; design,  analytics, project delivery, and operations.  We chatted about a number of different topics that had been discussed during the day's sessions.

Comparing reality and design

During a highway construction project, estimating how much earth has been cut and filled is critical because it determines for a large part payments to contractors. With laser scanning and UAVs it is now becoming possible to scan an entire project with greater frequency. Converting the scanned point clouds to reality meshes produces a manageable 3D image of the status of the construction project at a given time. Seeing changes from one week to the next, for example, requires a tool that can compare two reality meshes and identify where differences exceed a specified threshold. Depending on the type of project and the 3D scanning technology this could be millimeters or centimeters. Bentley has developed a product called ContectCaptureEdit which allows two reality meshes to be compared. The difference between two reality meshes captured a week apart can be used to compute quantitatively the volumes of cut and fill on a highway or rail construction project in the last week. This approach can also be used to monitor construction progress for buildings and civil projects. Bentley's vision for the future is to enable comparing not only two reality meshes but also a reality mesh and a design model. This would automate the process of detecting divergences from design which is essential for assuring that what is designed is built.

Classification of reality meshes (aka feature extraction)

Feature extraction is a methodology that has been used for many years to identify and classify objects in 2D images captured by remote sensing using cameras on satellites or fixed wing planes and helicopters. In the utility sector, classification is still a manual process with some exceptions. The advent of 3D scanning technologies including lidar and phodar (capturing many photos with a consumer digital camera) makes possible the really differentiating focus at Bentley on classifying 3D objects. 3D classification can provide more information than 2D feature extraction because the extra dimension allows you to determine, for example, the depth of cracks in concrete or the extent of deformation damage to a transformer. Bentley is applying deep learning and other AI technologies provided by the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to enable semi-automated and even completely automated classification of reality meshes. For example, Bentley is working with a partner SiteSEE to automatically classify scans of communications towers captured by UAVs. With a smart UAV and automatic classification, the process of inspecting communications towers could be fully automated, saving a lot of time and increasing reliability by enabling more frequent, less expensive inspections.

Reality modeling for substations

As an example where automated classification is feasible and could provide significant benefits is in creating digital models of existing (brownfield) substations. Currently the process is quite laborious. The substation is scanned using terrestrial lidar or phodar with the option to include lidar or digital cameras on UAVs. The reality mesh generated from the scans is then classified manually – which involves selecting recognizable objects and identifying them as transformers, holding tanks, pumps, buildings, or other types of object. The final step is to link each object to an entry in an asset database – such as Bentley's AssetWise. Bentley refers to this process as “operationeering”. Operationeering makes it possible to use the classified scan plus the linked database – possibly together with augmented reality - to improve operational efficiency. The link between an object's location and the information about the object stored in an asset database esnsures that maintenance staff have immediate access to everything – location and condition - they need to know when there is a problem.  Or it could be used to simply conduct an inspection.

There are tens of thousands of brownfield substations in the U.S. If the classification step could be automated, and if QR codes are pasted to objects in the substation before scanning, the entire process could be semi-automated saving a tremendous amount of tedious and time-consuming effort.

Interoperability

Large construction projects invariably involve CAD, BIM and other types of products from multiple vendors. For example, Revit, Bentley BIM, Tekla, Sketchup, and others may be used on the same project. At YII2017 Bentley announced iModel 2.0 and iModelHub which enable consistent interoperability between different vendors' products. For example, changes made in Revit can be synced as “change sets” through iModelHub to products from other vendors. Bentley developed an iModel for Revit two years ago and iModelHub is a generalization of the concept to other design products. iModelHub is a complementery product for ProjectWise, which is a file based system widely used in construction for sharing project designs and related information.

Connected data environment enabling full lifecycle management

Perhaps the most tantalizing technology concept advanced during Greg Bentley's session was the connected data environment (CDE) which conceptually is intended to enable data to be reused throughout the entire lifecycle, As Francois explained it to me, it is designed to enable roundtripping data between ProjectWise, which is used during design and construction, and AssetWise, which is intended for optimizing asset performance during operations and maintenance. Reusing data collected during design and construction for operations and maintenance remains extremely rare. If CDE provides a foundation for doing this, it could represent a first step in resolving a major challenge hindering full lifecycle data management.

During today's sessions there were many tantalizing hints of the things Bentley is doing to address major business challenges like enhancing project collaboration, automatically classifying 3D scans, and enabling information sharing across the full construction lifecycle. I am anticipating further elucidation about these very exciting developments in the next few days at YII2017.

Geospatial technology innovation is transformative

Innovation in spatial technology is transforming some of the world’s most important economic sectors.  The world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure through 2030 just to keep up with global GDP growth. To meet the world's future infrastructure needs, construction needs to be reinvented through a productivity revolution. Two spatial technologies, reality capture and building information modeling (BIM), are key to this transformation of construction. A series of two articles on the new spatial technologies that are transforming construction including hand-held scanners, single-photon laser scanning, SLAM for indoor navigation and autonomous UAVs, beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) UAVs, satellite images with 30 cm (about a foot) resolution, and daily digital images of the entire Earth landmass from satellites is appearing in Damage Prevention Professional.

Progress in advancing integrated BIM+geospatial standards for infrastructure

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

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Nigel Clifford, CEO of the Ordnance Survey, described a project that is intended to create a smart city model for four square kilometers of Manchester called cityverve.  The objective is to apply Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to a real city.  It is supported by Manchester City Council, Manchester Science Partnerships, the University of Manchester, Ordnance Survey, Cisco, BT and other tech players and well as government and Innovate UK.  It is intended to provide an open platform of platforms.  Among the fundamanental things that will be required to do this is open standards for modeling city infrastructure and to make this accessible to the geospatial and AEC communities.

Years ago private Dutch engineering and construction companies began adopting an integrated geospatial/BIM approach to construction.  I blogged previously about the firm Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult that adopted integrated BIM and GIS because many of its projects require full life-cycle BIM.  At the first GeoBIM conference in Amsterdam, Jothijs van Gaalen gave some real world examples of Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) highway construction that included GIS+BIM integration. BAM's motivation for investing in BIM+GIS are market developments especially more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project.   As another example, ARCADIS Netherlands has delivered a number of projects that integrate geospatial into the design process.

The Netherlands has also led in the development and application of open BIM/geospatial standards‎ in the construction industry including NL/SfB, BS&I, ETIM, CB-NL, IMGeo, CityGML, NLCS, GB-CAS, COINS, IFC, VISI, SALES, National Model BIM Protocol, and National Model BIM Implementation Plan.  The Netherlands has created a BIM Loket (BIM Gateway) that is intended to be a national portal for information about BIM and open BIM standards in the Netherlands 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 some 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 transportation infrastructure world the widely used LandXML standard, which is supported by  800 members in the roads and highway transportation sector, includes alignment, road, rail, survey, terrain, land parcels, drainage, wastewater, and water distribution systems.  LandXML is not associated with a recognized international standards organization and has had limited support for the past few years. 

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. 

The major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016.  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. A Candidate IFC-Alignment Standard is open for review now.

InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities. InfraGML supports a subset of the existing LandXML standard. InfraGML is comprised of several parts;

• Part 0: LandInfra Core Encoding Standard
• Part 1: LandInfra Land Features Encoding Standard
• Part 2: LandInfra Facilities and Projects Encoding Standard
• Part 3: LandInfra Alignments Encoding Standard
• Part 4: LandInfra Roads Encoding Standard
• Part 5: LandInfra Railways Encoding Standard
• Part 6: LandInfra Survey Encoding Standard
• Part 7: LandInfra Land Division - Encoding Standard

The Candidate OGC InfraGML encoding Standards was released for public comment in January of this year.  In April the Candidate OGC InfraGML 1.0: Part 7 – LandInfra Land Division - Encoding Standard was released.

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Phil Jackson of buildingSmart UK and UK Representative Infrastructure Room provided an update on the progress in extending IFC for infrastructure based on a common BIM/geospatial conceptual model;

• Linear alignments for road and rail - under deployment testing
• Common infrastructure architecture - developed jointly with OGC
• IFC for rail - an initial Chinese specification has been published
• IFC Bridges - just started

and several more are in active planning or ready to start;

• IFC for ports and harbours - starts this summer
• IFC for roads - ready to start
• IFC tunnel - planned

Thus it appears that building geospatial and AEC standards for transportation and land management based on a common conceptual model and developing in parallel is well advanced.

BIM + geospatial essential for improving UK construction productivity

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Simon Rawlinson of Arcadis, argued passionately for improving the efficency of the construction industry, which is 8% of the UK's GDP.  Digitalization, in which BIM + geospatial play a key role, is essential to delivering on making construction attractive for private investment.  In the UK construction productivity has not improved in 25 years and right now the construction industry is so unproductive that it can't attract top labour talent, wouldn't attract an Uber or Google and is a drag on the rest of the economy.

Clients/owners have a big role in the transformation of construction.  One of the practices that is responsible for the low level of motivation for construction productivity improvement is procurement.  Lowest bid based on CAPEX does not encourage innovation.  But there are signs that this procurement policy is being replaced in some government procurements by lowest OPEX or TOTEX.  For example, the competition to provide rolling stock for the Crossrail line was based on lowest OPEX and resulted in an important innovation, smart, sensor-equipped trains.  One of the goals of the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), one of several Leadership Councils in the UK, is to lower construction costs by 33% and to deliver projects 50% faster - providing clear benefits to owners.

Another problem is that the construction industry doesn't collaborate very well.  Collaboration needs to be encouraged among folks who have traditionally competed or not collaborated.  There are signs that this is changing too.  Large projects like Crossrail have driven more collaboration, in an industry that historically discouraged collaboration and created employment for the legal profession.  To increase collaboration the construction industry needs to develop common ways of working with shared data by adopting common standards, which will work to increasing innovation by enabling competition based on a common platform.  Much as a BIM model is a digital twin of a building or linear infrastructure, a 3D map of underground and above ground infrastructure is a digital twin of a city or town.  To make this accessible to all requires shared standards for spatial data - BIM and geospatial.

The entire UK economy is moving towards becoming data-driven and construction is lagging behind.  Simon's recommendation is that the new government needs to keep to the existing program and deliver on the goals of Digital Built Britain and Construction 2025 including better management of data and information, digital fabrication instead of on-site development, procurement based on TOTEX, and using regulation, through ofgem and ofwat, for example, to drive digitalization of the construction industry.