Between the Poles

Real time reality capture during construction key to digitizing the entire construction workflow

Utility construction is booming globally. Almost half a trillion annual investment in capital across all the main verticals, electric, natural gas and telecom has resulted in capital investment with construction with as high as 4% growth. On top of this in the U.S. there is the recent $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Utilities are facing business drivers that are motivating them to improve the productivity of their business processes and improve data quality especially the 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 a smart grid, and a rapidly evolving utility business model that changes utility priorities.

Current legacy workflows

The current construction workflow for utilities is a highly inefficient, manual process a lot of which hasn't changed in 40 years. Actual construction, the middle and key part of this workflow, has remained a paper based process that has remained mostly unchanged for over 40 years now. Construction crews typically use paper job packets to locate the job site, and document any as-built changes to the job. They use the paper job packets, work order sketch, or any other piece of paper in the folder to record any required attribute information about the assets being installed. As construction activities increase and newer downstream analysis systems are brought online, such as an outage management system (OMS) system or an advanced distribution management system (ADMS), the data collection requirements grow, adding additional burdens on the construction crews. These crews work in difficult of conditions on difficult, time consuming tasks, but are still asked to record all of the required information on paper. The paperwork is prone to delays in processing at each stage of the workflow cycle. This antiquated paper-based collection of work order completion data results in mounds of paperwork from the field with all the attendant issues of hand written notes. The GIS analysts receiving these paper work packets have to try to sift out reliable data from these paper records. The result is that the data that actually gets into the GIS often is missing, inaccurate, or out of date.  Backlogs of months are not uncommon.

Real time data collection enables digitizing the entire construction workflow

Locusview has developed a digital construction management platform that digitizes the entire workflow process. It is designed with the construction crews needs in mind, matches their workflows, and simplifies their data collection tasks. Work order data is collected via a mobile application using smart forms, high-accuracy GPS, and barcode scanners. Data can be immediately accessed by the back office staff, in real time. This two-way communication can be used to resolve design changes that require due to field conditions, thus reducing invoice and billing delays.

Locusview Mobile integrated with high-accuracy GNSS receivers and barcode scanners eliminates manual data entry. Data forms are displayed based on pre-configured industry-specific data model rules using complex conditionality alongside smart forms.  Simultaneously back office managers use Locusview Web to gain real time field visibility, enabling project progress tracking, real time validations, contractor auditing, and smart alerts, ensuring compliance with safety, regulatory requirements and work processes since all stakeholders, field crews, contractors, supervisors, project managers, and inspectors are collaborating on the same job using a single platform. This fully digitized process reduces the time and effort typically required of construction crews to document their field activities, expedites and standardizes field data collection, and improves data integrity creating the foundation for a high fidelity digital twin.

A key metric we track is the as-built backlog. That's the time it takes to enter as-built data into GIS after completion of construction. That's only one part of closeout, but it's an important part.  Our customers are reporting a 70% reduction in their as-built backlogs. They are also reporting 20 % less time spent in the field. Furthermore they are seeing 50% cost savings in data collection because they're enabling field crews, people that are already out in the field, to collect this high quality data with high-accuracy GNSS devices and barcode scanners avoiding the necessity of hiring outside survey crews. This translates into better capex efficiency, putting more assets in the ground per dollar of CAPEX spend and Increased customer service, something very important for competitive industries as telecom.

This simplified data collection process is designed to fully integrate with downstream utility applications as well. The job closeout process using Locusview has been reduced from 8 months to 3 days. As a concrete example a very manual piece of the closeout process, the material reconciliation piece, has been reduced from 7 hours to 12 minutes.

Real time data collection benefits all stakeholders

Many stakeholders are involved in the the complete construction work order cycle; contractors built the job, GIS analysts updated their maps based on as-builts submitted by the construction crew, operations imports the GIS data and operates their Outage Management System (OMS), planning and engineering use GIS and other asset information to plan for future growth. The work management system uses the data to initiate, manage and closeout the work order process for each job.

In addition there are a number of "forgotten" user personas that use and need accurate data from the field. The finance and corporate accounting groups rely on data in the system of record to be highly accurate and reflect the most current state of the utilities assets. Utilities go to the bond and stock markets on a regular basis to borrow funds to build and maintain their utility systems. And potential lenders or investors rely on the accurate valuation of the company. Interest rates charged by those investors correspond directly to the health of the utility and impact the cost of funds. If the work order update processes are delayed by 2 to 6 months, then the system of record is misleading and the lenders or investors may question the financial health of the utility. In addition, delayed closeout of work in the work management system will result in increased cost of funds charges to the work order via extended construction work in progress (CWIP) and allowance for funds used during construction (AFUDC) charges that are on all of the open work orders. CWIP and AFUDC is a common practice for accounting for the cost of funds in the United States and it's a concept that's gaining momentum here in Canada as well. Also many local governments apply property tax assessments on utilities for the utility assets within their municipality. If the system of record is not up to date, then the property tax assessments will also be incorrect. Contract and management organizations also rely on the accurate and timely reporting of work completed by contractor crews, as well as, closing out of the invoicing process. Delays in documenting completed work in the field will result in delayed invoicing by the contractors for the services that they've provided to the utility.

Conclusion

The key is real-time reality capture, that gets you the benefit of driving a digital twin into utilities by capturing the most accurate, high-fidelity data at the most opportune time during construction, not afterwards where you're mapping a scar. Furthermore it's a unified solution standardizing construction data collection real time across utility and contractor crews.

 

This post is based on Danny Petrecca's and Robert Schultz's (Locusview) talk at Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF).

Automated feature recognition helps democratize utility mapping for producing infrastructure digital twins

In jurisdictions worldwide the low quality of underground location data has been identified as a top cause of underground utility damage. Existing underground utility data, most of which is stored in network owners' records, is often inaccurate, out of date or simply missing.  In North America in a survey of 402 locate professionals better facility maps received nearly unanimous agreement as a top strategy for improving the efficiency and quality of locates.  Singapore's Digital Underground project is unequivocal about the economic and social impact of low quality underground location data stating that "virtually all stakeholders are aware that much of the available information is unreliable and that this has repeatedly led to losses of time, money and opportunities."

Challenges facing the utility mapping industry

The root cause of the low quality of underground utility data is how utility mapping is structured as an industry. The primary activities of the utility mapping industry are data collection and how we keep and share this data with other parties.

Data collection

The way we collect is slowly changing, but predominantly we're still using traditional survey and locate methods. The survey methodology we are using hasn't changed in a hundred years. It's a very time and materials based, manual and analog process. Survey processes are slow and expensive to execute and require specialized equipment and skill sets, and safety is a big concern.

Locating underground utilities is one of the biggest causes of delays in construction schedules, service disruptions are a common occurrence, safety is always a major concern. and locate operations are slow to execute. Accuracy and timeliness are major issues. Locate operations require specialized equipment and skill sets which restricts locators to a small number of industry insiders.  A major shortfall is that underground utility location data is rarely available during the crucial planning and design stages of civil engineering projects.

Democratization of utility mapping

The utility mapping industry needs some fundamental changes. We need to move away from the monopoly that exists right now. There is just a handful of companies that are able to go out and collect underground utility data. We need to democratize data collection so that many more people can collect this data, targeting a crowd sourced approach and enabling multiple creators or collectors providing this data. This distributes the responsibility for the data as well. The more distributed the responsibilities, the lower risk and the lower the cost of failures will be.

We also need to change the skill level required. With current technology, we should be able to automate much of routine locating and thus enable many more people to do it. Using inexpensive technology will lower the cost of collecting and aggregating locate data. As data becomes lower cost to capture, data retention will become less expensive which will encourage people to retain the location data they acquire rather than simply painting/marking the ground and not capturing the data digitally.

Democratization is the real future of 3D infrastructure mapping. Right now data is still very siloed. We'll always have the traditional mapping companies, survey companies, line locating companies and asset owners going out and collecting their own data. But through crowdsourcing data from routine day to day locating and mapping, infrastructure projects, and other sources, aggregating that data and distributing access to that data is how utility mapping will really come to the forefront.  It should be easy to upload data into a central register where it can be made accessible to multiple stakeholders. Compliance with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards provides a basis for full interoperability enabling open access to every single conduit, cable, pipe, or other piece of infrastructure in real time from your phone, your tablet, your laptop or other applications.

Infrastructure digital twin

We think the best paradigm for producing and capturing asset data is through collecting it into an infrastructure digital twin. Digital twins have made a lot of progress in a variety of industries. Most importantly, for the utility mapping industry, it should be noted that creating a digital twin is much easier than it was even just a few years ago. We think the time is right for an infrastructure digital twin and it can be just at the asset level for one particular company, but we believe it should be at a regional level. Cities, municipalities and regional governments around the world are beginning to develop comprehensive digital twins of all of their physical infrastructure; buildings, roads, trees, power lines, and subsurface utilities and they're pouring resources into it.

And we think that Canada and the United States should start doing the same thing. And for us in the utility industry, data collection costs are lower than they ever have been. There's clearly interest among stakeholders and governments to start dealing with infrastructure and utility mapping problems, particularly to lower the number and costs of strikes, injuries and the loss of life. We now know a lot more about how to create data from other data sets, using different types of analysis and artificial intelligence to piece disparate data sets together. Using AI machine learning in the cloud is much less inexpensive compared to just a few years ago. And nowadays one of the things that makes infrastructure digital twins readily accessible to the utility industry is the fact that storing huge volumes of data in the cloud has become very inexpensive.

What is infrastructure digital twin ? First of all, a digital twin needs to result in effective action. It's not just enough say we have a digital twin philosophy The purpose of having a digital twin is to result in effective action that improves your business. It needs to use real time and historical data, which is paramount for us in the utility mapping industry, and it's going to be motivated by outcomes. For us in the utility industry, it is to reduce and even eliminate utility strikes during construction and the associated risks of injuries and fatalities.

The infrastructure digital twin has to be stored and managed in a relational database so it can be queried, analyzed and improved on through time, and related to other data sets. Processes for collecting data and maintaining data must be simple so that we can break the barrier of restricting underground utility mapping to a specialized group of people. If we truly want to democratize and compile data from disparate data sets, we need very simple processes to get data into the database, analyzed and maintained.

An infrastructure digital twin should be captured and maintained in 3D, even though most utilities in the ground are within just a couple of meters of the top of the ground. The 3D component is vital, because part of analyzing a data set is that much ancillary data is 3D such as overhead power lines that come down the side of a pole into conduits below the ground,

Imagery that's taken looking straight down at the ground, like traditional satellite imagery, can be visualized on a map and incorporated directly into a GIS database. But other types of imagery such as oblique, 360-degree, street-side, and inspection imagery need to be treated differently.  Oriented Imagery has a range of possible applications. For example, a construction company might use it to review asset inventory photos taken by field workers at a construction site. A telecom company or electric utility would use it to examine close range inspection images of electrical and telecom towers from many different angles. Oriented imagery applications enable you to see exactly where the image is on the map as you pan or zoom in the image. There are spatial navigation tools designed to work specifically with oriented imagery. You can query oriented images using spatial and temporal filters.

Finally, it is very important to have standardized formats, including storage formats and cloud formats.  It improves our ability to inexpensively use machine learning to do associative analyses of disparate data sets to make a larger, more conflated data sets.

Automated feature extraction

Maintaining accurate, up-to-date, comprehensive data about assets, above ground and below ground, has been a challenge for utilities for decades. Now new technologies including machine learning are being applied to automate real-time maintenance of utility network information and provide a foundation for infrastructure digital twins.

Automated feature extraction has advanced dramatically in the last few years.  This is an example where high density LiDAR and ultra high resolution imagery was used on a very low, very small diameter gas distribution install from an open trench. You can clearly see the ease with which the LiDAR produces a 3D representation of all of the local utility infrastructure.

Much of the the advancement in in automated 3D mapping have derived from the autonomous vehicle industry which have trickled down to other parts of the GIS industry.  The hardware and software are vastly easier to use and produce vastly better data. You can see from these ortho images collected from our system and the LiDAR overlaid on it. Feature extraction was used to automatically define top of pipe, top of ditch and actual joints in the pipe. Automated classification of LiDAR removes the need for someone to go out there with a Pogo stick and find the top of pipe. It makes it possible to simply drive alongside and scan with a mobile LiDAR system an open trench containing a newly installed pipe to produce a detailed 3D model with centimetre accuracy without having a person present. It is much safer - no boots on the pavement - and it drastically reduces the cost.

We prefer mobile mapping systems as opposed to handhelds because mobile mapping systems produce a tremendous amount more data and its registration tends to be vastly superior. It is much safer because it eliminates a need for someone to get out of a vehicle - so no boots on the pavement. Anytime you're still getting out, whether you're using handhold laser handhold mapping system, or a Pogo stick, you still have a person outside the vehicle walking around a street. With a mobile system you eliminate that risk, and you also drastically decrease the time required to do the collection. Here is another example where automated feature extraction was used to identify the electro fused coupling. You can see the butt joints, you can see the Ts and so forth. All this can be done very simply now with automated feature extraction.

Data registers

While surveyors may have had experience with a provincial or other types of survey register, utility location data identified during routine locate (one call) operations in general is only used to mark the ground and is rarely recorded, digitally or otherwise. Practically this means locators going back to the same location they were at just a few weeks ago to repeat the locate operation for another project. People in the locate industry are very familiar with this and the  amount of schedule and cost expense it causes. Exposing people to relocate or remap an area that was just done not too long ago is doubling their risk. Secondly, because the data is not retained or kept in easily accessible ways, we can't analyze it.  For example, we might want to confirm that we have correctly identified the type of utility, the accuracy of its location, or determine if there have been changes in its location, type, or current status since we last detected it. And because the data is not being retained and centrally managed at a global level or at a large scale level, there's no real opportunity for organic data enhancements or improvements.

The CGA Next Practices Report to Industry has made the case that a comprehensive national GIS map of buried infrastructure is among the opportunities for systemic improvement with the greatest ROI for industry. The benefits of a national register are greater safety, enhanced construction efficiency; reduced design, construction, and maintenance costs; greater regulatory compliance; improved locate efficiency; fewer project delays and budget overruns; fewer service disruptions to the public, less traffic disruptions and loss of custom and other inconveniences for the public.

Sharing maps of underground infrastructure is not totally new to Canada. For example, the City of Calgary's Joint Utility Mapping Project (JUMP) system, the ICI Society in British Columbia, the City of Toronto's Digital Map Owners Group (DMOG) and others have been sharing underground utility information for years.

The Canadian Underground Infrastructure Register (CUIR) is a new national initiative started at the beginning of the year. The CUIR initiative is intended to enhance current practices in a way that enables all stakeholder groups to benefit from the initiative; construction contractors, network owners, government transportation agencies, design engineers, subsurface utility engineering (SUE) engineers, surveyors, locators, workers in the field and the public. The CUIR initiative has been inspired by the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) project currently being implemented in the UK. The objective of NUAR is to develop a register of location data for all underground infrastructure in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that is accessible to all network owners and government agencies.

This post is based on Joseph Hlady's (Lux Modus) talk at Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF).

An infrastructure digital twin provides a dynamic environment for managing underground assets of a multi-utility campus

For organizations managing a campus such as educational facilities, healthcare facilities, commercial real estate, utilities, and municipalities managing public works, storm sewer systems, and parks which are characterized by having many different utilities and and other infrastructure, an infrastructure digital twin provides owners, operators and third-parties with a streamlined, cloud-based solution that maps, manages and shares a wide range of subsurface and above ground assets, including fibre, pipes, electric power cables, lighting, conduits, and other structures enabling campus asset owners to not only track their assets but to provide all the information about their assets; their history, their replacement cost and their current cost without which you cannot justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

Infrastructure digital twin

A major challenge for legacy asset management systems is that documents are hard to access. Problems in the field are hard to identify because it takes too long to access the relevant documents and other information in the field. It's hard to share architecture and utility drawings with contractors and other stakeholders. People are really copying large blueprints or as-builts and delivering a set of documents to a new contractor who's just been onboarded and the contractor has to spend weeks studying these documents and comparing this information to what's there, what's underground, what's above ground and matching it together.

The way we address this challenge is by creating an infrastructure digital twin which provides accessible information to all stakeholders through a subscription service. A full digital twin of your campus, is a big, costly project, but an infrastructure digital twin is simpler and much faster. It involves site verification and infrastructure mapping as a service including drone imaging, site surveying, walking the campus and verifying objects. If the customer is using some type of infrastructure detection, the accurate information from that system plugs into our system, so it remains live. We support Open Geospatial Consortium standards to ensure interoperability. We onboard all of the data and we do that for any new updates on the campus. If something is wrong in the map and it's not in the site, or in site and not in the map, or if the drone gave us a better accuracy, we detect that and make corrections. For example, customers often hire utility engineering firms to conduct subsurface utility surveys (SUE).  We load that information and match it with everything we have in the system about their underground and other assets. Full onboarding requires 40 days or less. And more importantly, all the data is owned by the client all the time.

We've loaded over four million assets for our customers. Those assets are being used by thousands of users, including facilities, teams, construction managers, engineering and architecture firms, local utilities, fire departments and others.

You can share data immediately with anyone you want. And there are no limits on the number of users in any of our systems. If you onboard a new construction company for a new project, you just provide them with a login, specify what they can access and see, and they are onboard.

Dynamic view of your assets

The system provides a dynamic view of all your assets. It's not a static image, GIS or CAD files which you update every several months. It's real time, live presentation of information coming from a database and it is integrated with all your other systems. You can drill down on every single conduit, cable, pipe, or other piece of infrastructure and query all its attributes and see the sources of the data. You have access to the data in real time from your phone, your tablet, or your laptop because it is a fully cloud solution. We are able to do that because we are compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and follow OGC standards. We are using open systems in terms of representing all the attributes about every item.  For a typical campus environment, ranging from a few blocks to a college campus or hospital complex, for example, you may have 20,000 assets. All of those assets and their associated attributes are captured and live in that database. We're building IOT integration, so you will have real time data on top of their various asset layers. You can see the water flow and the temperature and the pressure from the sensors. To go back to the updates. We are building integration with augmented reality. so that all underground assets can be visualized in 3D AR.

We provide a dynamic way of having base maps. You can use Google Maps, Esri World Imagery, or OpenStreetMap or even a mix of these. You can add your own imagery. 

In addition to the dynamic view of the locations and attributes of all your assets, you also have a plan room. All your documents are there, your engineering drawings, as-builts, survey and SUE reports, legacy maps, and other sources of underground data. You can search them by date or by the contractor or surveyor who supplied this data to you. These documents are accessible to you at any time from any device.

Managing asset budgeting

More importantly, the system provides an executive summary of all your assets. For example, in this site, which we have built as an example (we cannot share real data publicly) we have included about $4 million worth of assets. FM people need to deliver projects on time, minimize disruption of services to those people who are using these facilities, and improve the sustainability of their facilities. To do this requires that you can justify your CAPEX and OPEX budget. For some capital projects, you might be able to look at the total cost for adding a new building. But for budgets for operations and maintenance, retrofitting a fiber network, changing your irrigation network, it's really difficult to do that without having access to everything about your assets, their history, their replacement cost and their current cost. Without this information you cannot justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

The key to managing budgets is by replacement costs. If you want to replace your electric network, you need to know how you built the electric network in the first place. The database provides access to all this information. You can break your assets down by type of structure; electric power, conduits, lighting, water, wastewater and gas pipe networks. You can see their life expectancy, aggregate them based on their expected time of expiry and then decide on remedial action. You also need to worry about the impact of potential accidents and most importantly your liabilities. If a major underground gas line is damaged, then you might face heavy liabilities because it might interrupt gas service not just to your campus but for the entire area or even an entire municipality.

Our system has an ROI calculator so you can compute your potential savings. This has helped customers secure grants because they were able to compute the information needed to submit a bid bond.

Conclusion

An infrastructure digital twin provides immediately accessible information to all your assets for all stakeholders through a subscription service. It's a real time, live presentation of information coming from a database and it is integrated with all your other systems. For critical budgeting operations and maintenance, you have immediate access to everything about your assets; their history, their replacement cost and their current cost that enables you to justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

This post is based on Moufid Charafeddine's (BetterGIS) talk at Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF).

Developing a subsurface digital twin for Singapore requires data quality management

Singapore has severely limited land, but unlimited space and has started to build many types of activities underground to save the land above ground for the better living of citizens. Many of the traditional utilities such as electric power, water, wastewater and others, as well new type of utilities, such as the Pneumatic Waste Conveyance System are almost one hundred percent underground. Parts of the transportation network, such as the metro, are also underground.  In addition some storage, waste disposal and national defence facilities are underground.

Data quality

As underground development expands in Singapore reliable data about the location of underground infrastructure becomes increasingly essential. Data quality is a huge issue. Virtually all stakeholders are aware that much of the available information is unreliable and that this has repeatedly led to losses of time, money and opportunities.  From the perspective of planning and land administration, infrastructure development, and planning and design there are important benefits in the form of reduced uncertainty and risks to be derived from reliable underground data.  These include reduced costs, avoiding unnecessary rework, minimizing destruction to the environment, avoiding disruption of consumer services, and greater safety for people working in the environment as well as the general public in general.

To address this issue the Digital Underground (DU) initiative was started in 2017. The objective of DU is to develop a reliable map of Singapore's subsurface infrastructure for planning and land administration. The DU has four phases. The objective of Phase 1 was to identify the problem and create a road map. The second phase involved looking into what was required to create a utility mapping ecosystem. The current phase involves looking at the underground utility workflow which has many components that will contribute towards reliable data.  The final phase is the operational phase when we implement a new utility mapping ecosystem.

In Phase 1 an assessment was made of the reliability (locational accuracy, completeness, and currency) of the existing data. It was concluded that the data quality of the data is seriously deficient. In terms of location, it is  inaccurate, much of it is out of date, and it is also incomplete. It was also found that the quality level of the data is undefined, in other words, no quality level has been assigned to each facility for example based on a quality standard like ASCE 38 or PAS 128. We do not know which piece of data is of higher quality or which piece of data is sufficiently reliable to be relied on for planning and land administration.

Road map for improving data quality

Addressing data quality involves fundamental survey, locating and mapping issues. In addition to assessing data quality an objective of Phase 1 was to develop a road map for addressing the data quality issue. First we wanted to ensure that going forward data for all newly installed utilities would be reliable. In 2017 we implemented a strategy requiring certified survey quality as-builts. Secondly, we started to look for opportunities to improve the data quality of existing below ground infrastructure. We are looking at several new technologies, such as ground penetrating radar and gyro mapping for detecting underground utilities and LiDAR and photogrammetric capture with a smart phone of trial trenches. We are also exploring ways of capturing not just vector data, but integrating 3D point cloud data of an open trial trench in our GIS so the next person interested in this section of road doesn't have to open up the trench to see what's there.

A key part of the road map is governance, especially accountability and transparency; assigning responsibilities for data capture, data quality improvement, and data quality management. We want to introduce a new framework so that we can ensure high quality utility data ongoing in the future. We are suggesting a process that would not interrupt or change the current utility workflow, but add a new data quality workflow on top of the current workflow. Asset owners will be able to continue to do their work the way they have in the past, but will be required to submit their data to a Data Quality Hub for quality control to ensure that data quality standards are complied with. We intend to implement quality control on the front end when data is submitted to the database, not at the tail end of the information supply chain. Eventually this process is intended to ensure that we are getting reliable and high quality data that can be shared back again to the end user, the planners and land administrators.

Community of practice

Creating a utility mapping ecosystem requires buy in from network owners, transportation agencies, excavators, and others. The Digital Underground Connect is a platform where we provide people to meet, to learn and to improve.

 

This post is based on Victor Khoo's talk on the Singapore Digital Underground Project at the Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF).

Key initiatives of importance to the global geospatial+AEC subsurface digital twin community

Two initiatives of importance to the global geospatial community will begin this June.

Expanding Responsibility for the BetweenThePoles blog

First of all we are expanding the BetweenThePoles blog from a single content provider (Geoff Zeiss) to an industry collective that will be able to mine many more geospatial industry players. Geoff is stepping down from day to day responsibility for the blog (he doesn't like the word retiring) and ownership and administration will transition to GoGeomatics Canada, advised by a collective of industry leaders in the geospatial+AEC sector.

The content and aims of BetweenThePoles will remain the same. The blog encompasses the application of geospatial technology in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) and utilities. Primary focus areas are worldwide legislation, governance, regulations, and new technologies for mapping underground utilities and enabling subsurface digital twins, CAD+GIS and BIM+geospatial integration to enable full lifecycle construction, and innovative technologies for vegetation management for electric power utilities.

By way of background the BetweenThePoles blog was initiated in 2006 by Geoff Zeiss. Since then the blog has hosted over 2,500 posts and received over 1.3 million lifetime page views. Currently 3,500 active users access the blog each month. The blog will be continued with its current focus; mapping underground infrastructure,  BIM+geospatial integration, and innovations in vegetation management for utility transmission and distribution.

Making Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF) and Annual Event

The second initiative follows on the very successful Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF 2022), which was a follow-up event to the Canadian Underground Forum in 2021.

The genesis of SUMSF is found within Canada’s National Geospatial Conference, GeoIgnite. In 2021 Jonathan Murphy and Geoff Zeiss came together over the idea to create a leadership and technology forum on the theme of underground infrastructure mapping. With the help and financial support of the global underground mapping industry the Canadian Underground Forum (CUF 2020) was held virtually in 2021. From this success, a new and larger stand-alone event with a new global brand and perspective was launched in 2022, the Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF 2022). 

SUMSF 2022 was held virtually March 22nd and 23rd 2022 again with the support of the underground mapping industry. SUMSF was themed to bring together individuals and organizations to share information about and contribute to improving the mapping of underground infrastructure. This online conference brought together exceptional speakers in the underground locating and mapping sector and was well attended by the geospatial and engineering community.

Based on the success of these two events GoGeomatics Canada has decided to make the conference an annual event. Next year, SUMSF will be held virtually March 6th and 7th. SUMSF is hosted and presented by GoGeomatics. Like BetweenThePoles blog, it will be advised and supported by industry leaders with the support of the SUMSF LinkedIn Group. 

BetweenThePoles will remain an important platform for communication and engagement on the the application of geospatial technology.  

Anyone interested in joining the collective for the BetweenThePoles blog are encouraged to contact Jonathan Murphy at GoGeomatics Canada. As well anyone interested in joining the advisory committee for SUMSF 2023 is encouraged to do the same.

Geoff Zeiss

Developing a subsurface digital twin for Canada

The Canadian Underground Infrastructure Register initiative

Underground infrastructure provides the essential services that fuel our economy. During construction excavators often damage elements of this infrastructure because the location of underground cables, pipes and ducts is not well known. Underground utilities are one of the biggest causes of delays and budget overruns on public construction projects. When these utilities are damaged, people may be injured, utility services to the public disrupted, and other indirect and societal costs incurred such as traffic disruptions and loss of custom.  Making the precise location of buried infrastructure accessible to engineers, designers and excavators not only keeps people safer, but also introduces greater efficiency into construction processes.

The annual number of voluntarily reported damages to underground utilities Canada-wide totals close to 12,000.  Direct costs include the costs of sending a crew to repair the damaged pipe or cable. Indirect costs include many factors that are often hard to quantify such as traffic disruption, injuries and fatalities among workers and the public, and lost custom that local businesses experience. Damage to underground infrastructure during construction costs the Canadian economy about $3 billion annually. A large proportion of the costs of underground damage is borne by consumers, primarily through service disruptions. Return on investment (ROI) studies of improving location information about underground utilities conducted since the late 1990s have consistently revealed a large ROI, most recently $21.00 saved for every US$1.00 invested.

Six months ago an initiative to address the challenge of reducing damage to underground infrastructure was formed in Canada by Steve Slusarenko. Called the Canada Underground Infrastructure Register (CUIR) initiative its goal is to elevate awareness of the challenge of damage prevention in Canada and to develop a solution to enhance and improve the damage prevention processes currently in use. The CUIR initiative is intended to enhance current practices in a way that enables all stakeholder groups to benefit from the initiative; construction contractors, network owners, government transportation agencies, design engineers, subsurface utility engineering (SUE) engineers, surveyors, locators, workers in the field and the public. A cross-disciplinary team is being formed by reaching out to all stakeholder groups to elevate awareness of the CUIR project and achieve broad representation from the community.

To put this in context sharing maps of underground infrastructure is not new to Canada. For example, the City of Calgary's Joint Utility Mapping Project (JUMP) system, the ICI Society in British Columbia, the City of Toronto's Digital Map Owners Group (DMOG) and others have been sharing underground utility information for years.

Recently the CGA Next Practices Report to Industry argued that a comprehensive national GIS map of buried infrastructure is among the opportunities for systemic improvement with the greatest ROI for industry. The CUIR initiative has also been inspired by the progress of the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) project currently underway in the UK. The objective of NUAR is to develop a register of location data for all underground infrastructure in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that is accessible to all network owners and government agencies.

The benefits of a national register are improved safety; greater construction efficiency; reduced design, construction, and maintenance costs; greater regulatory compliance; improved locate efficiency; fewer project delays and budget overruns; fewer service disruptions to the public; and less traffic disruptions, loss of custom and other inconveniences for the public.

Opportune time to develop a national underground registry

There are several reasons why now is an opportune time to develop a national underground registry. First, according to a recent report from the Next Practices Initiative of the Common Ground Alliance the damage prevention industry has reached an inflection point. For more than half a decade, the rate of damage to underground infrastructure in North America has increased or remained stagnant. The North American one call system has become highly inefficient and industry confidence in the system has been eroded, resulting in a process that has stalled and is not achieving its primary goal of reducing damage to underground infrastructure. Second, recent developments is several jurisdictions have shown and are showing that the barriers to the development of such as system are surmountable. Thirdly, new innovative technical developments are making to possible to detect, capture and share underground information more efficiently and accurately than ever before.

Background: UK National Underground Asset Register

One of the most important initiatives that shows that what has been the major barrier to the development of an underground registry can be surmounted is the UK's National Underground Asset Register (NUAR). This initiative grew out of a bottom-up collaboration among asset owners and organizations involved in working on and maintaining embedded asset networks in the North East of England and Central London. The foundation for two successful pilots was provided by network owners coming together to agree on a legal framework for data sharing. Each network owner remained the custodian of its own data which provided for clear accountability chains in terms of ownership, governance and regulation. Also fundamental for achieving a high level of participation among asset owners was a risk-based approach based on a high standard of data security and data protection.

Challenges to development of a national underground infrastructure register

Chief among the barriers to a national register identified by a recent CGA report is the lack of the political will to share information. For several reasons including competitive, security and liability issues in some sectors there has been industry resistance to sharing facility location information with other stakeholders. One of the important learnings from the NUAR project is that this barrier is surmountable.

It is important to recognize at the outset that the challenge in developing a national register is not primarily technical. A growing list of companies provide technologies that are being used successfully to detect existing underground infrastructure, capture location of newly installed or exposed facilities with survey grade accuracy, and record and share underground location information on handhelds in the field. The chief challenges are organization, governance, and a robust funding mechanism.

Organization

A key barrier to developing a national register identified by the CGA is the lack of a centralized, trusted organization capable of providing the governance for and implementing a national GIS underground infrastructure database. Historically, different jurisdictions have dealt with the organizational challenge in different ways.

• In North America the industry standard is a mandated one call system funded by utility owners. In Canada an option for a national register would be to build on the existing one call systems, which enjoy 100% participation by law. One call procedures are familiar to many construction stakeholders and this option would minimize the changes required from current practice.

• Private for-profit companies run one call systems across Canada and internationally private companies run underground information sharing systems in Australia, US, and Singapore.

• An industry consortium is another option. In British Columbia, the ICI Society was formed a number of years ago by utilities who voluntarily got together and agreed to share their data for use cases other than damage prevention during excavation.

• A government supported voluntary system is another option. The Scottish Community Apparatus Data Vault (Vault) was initiated in 2012 when utilities and government transportation agencies got together and agreed to share data among themselves using a computer system developed at the University of Leeds.

• In some jurisdictions, government have mandated damage prevention structures. Laws and associated regulations stipulate activities that network owners, excavators and other stakeholders are required perform during a construction project. An important motivation for mandated systems is that they achieve 100% participation.

   

The main point here is that there are different approaches to organizing the capture and sharing of information about underground infrastructure among stakeholders. The most important factor in choosing an appropriate organization structure is that it must be able to achieve 100 % participation (or as close to 100% that is reasonably achievable) among those organization and disciplines involved in capturing and maintaining underground data including utility and telecom network owners, pipeline owners and operators, oil and gas firms, government transportation and other agencies, SUE engineers, surveyors and locators. Anything less 100 % detracts from the potential value of the register.

Governance

A fundamental requirement of a system for sharing information about underground utilities is security and data protection based on an agreed open and transparent governance model. Network owners need to feel confident that the system has robust security and data protection.  This needs to be laid out in the rules of engagement as part of the legal framework agreed to by all participants. A key success factor in the NUAR project was that network owners were able to agree on a legal framework for data sharing.  Each network owner remained the custodian of its own data which provided for clear accountability chains in terms of ownership, governance and regulation.

User fees

An important question is whether users should be expected to pay for this service? User fees should be viewed not just as contributing to funding but also for their impact on achieving a high level of participation. Traditionally in North America the one call system is funded by the network operators at no cost to excavators . The NUAR project in the U.K. is currently holding a public consultation to consider several options including fees for network operators, excavators, and other users of the system.

Funding mechanism

A national underground register provides an essential public service, contributing billions of dollars to the national economy, improving the productivity of the construction industry and providing important benefits to Canadian society as a whole, and its funding model should reflect the importance of its role. In the broader context of developing a subsurface digital twin, the funding model should enable the register to address other use cases in addition to damage during excavations including emergency response, utility asset maintenance, disaster planning and response, and smart cities programs.

A national register must be a dynamic organization able to take advantage of the latest technical innovations to accelerate the development of a high accuracy, up to date and comprehensive repository of underground data. Achieving this goal requires a robust funding model that can provide support not only for operations but also to provide for innovation. 

Data quality responsibility

An essential part of any conversation about data is who is responsible for each data element. When the registry reports that the accuracy of the location of a cable or pipe is within a half a meter horizontally and a meter vertically, I need to know who captured the data, when and with what equipment and most importantly who signed off for it. If it came from a SUE survey signed by a professional engineer, I will have confidence in it, but if the data is sourced from utility records with no professional taking responsibility for it, I will have little grounds for confidence in using it. Furthermore, metadata and a sign-off by a professional enables an informed conversation about whether the newly acquired data is better and should replace the existing record.

One of the things that needs to be clarified in the context of underground infrastructure is the roles of locators, professional surveyors, and professional engineers in collecting and certifying data. For example, in Colorado and Montana it is a requirement that as-builts be signed off by a professional. In most jurisdictions SUE surveys must be signed off by a professional. Understanding the equipment used to gather information and the reliability of that technique in that particular project situation is the responsibility of the person putting their sign and seal on the data. To choose and assign the appropriate coordinate system requires a professional surveyor who will also tie that decision in with with the existing project-level coordinates or survey coordinates and make sure it all fits together for the overall project. Assigning quality levels compliant with the ASCE 38 and CSA S-250 here in Canada requires sign off by a professional engineer. In North America land surveyors and professional engineers carry insurance that is designed specifically for them in the case of liabilities.

But what is the role of locators in upgrading location data about existing underground infrastructure ? Utility records comprise the vast majority of the data we have about underground utilities and much of this data is inaccurate, out of date or simply missing (especially in the case of abandoned infrastructure and infrastructure without a known owner). It is estimated that in the U.S. over $10 billion is spent annually in locating underground utilities and other infrastructure. Most of this is routine locate operations conducted by locators, often in response to a one call ticket, but it includes locate operations such as hydro vac contracted by excavators. Currently most of this data is not recorded or shared. To enable a national registry to achieve an acceptable level of data quality will require processes to upgrade the quality of existing data. Accurate as-builts and SUE surveys will play an important part, but given the huge volume of data, it seems clear that locators are going to be key to upgrading the quality of the data we hold about existing infrastructure. To enable locators to contribute in a meaningful way to improving this data, we are going to have to look at new innovative technologies for conducting locate operations and capturing and sharing the results, potentially new qualifications and certifications for locators, and new ways of assigning responsibility for data collected during routine locate operations.

Beneficiaries

Considering the impact of a national register for underground infrastructure on the various stakeholder groups suggest that many would benefit.

• One of the big benefits of a national register is risk reduction. Evidence from the Colorado experience, where contractors participated in the initiative right from the beginning, suggests that contractors there realized significantly less underground damage and very substantial financial benefits as a result of the measures implemented by CDOT.

• Another construction stage where reliable underground location data is also essential is planning and early engineering design.  The payback on having accurate data on the location or underground utilities during planning and design is enormous. Knowing reliably where underground utilities are located avoids redesign work and utility relocations.

• In Colorado the state Department of Transportation is the agency that is responsible for regulating the public ROW which provided a basis for regulating public construction projects to achieve more on time completions, fewer budget overruns and ultimately less cost to the taxpayer.

• For surveyors and SUE engineers a national register will increase demand for high accuracy location as-builts and for high quality SUE surveys.

• For network operators a national underground register would reduce the frequency of outages, eliminate unnecessary and expensive relocations, reduce  liabilities, lower the cost of supporting locate operations in response to one call notifications and ensure greater regulatory compliance.

• A major share of the cost of underground utility damage is borne by the rate-paying public primarily through loss of service.  A national underground repository would reduce service interruptions and lower the risk of traffic and other disruptions, injuries and fatalities associated with incidents of damage to underground infrastructure. 

• For locators a national register represents a large opportunity to contribute to accurately locating and recording location data for the millions of miles of existing underground infrastructure for which existing data is generally unreliable. To do this efficiently will require familiarity with new and innovative technology for locating existing underground infrastructure. The effect of these changes should be to raise the professional profile of locators and this will be reflected in higher pay levels and reduced staff turnover.

A national underground registry would also be expected to result in lower insurance costs which would produce financial benefits for many stakeholders. Construction contracting is a low margin business and reducing insurance premiums would be significant benefit for them as it would add directly to their bottom line. Reduced insurance costs would also be expected to benefit network operators and others.

Summary

Underground utility damage is expensive economically and socially. The Canada Underground Infrastructure Register (CUIR) initiative is intended to elevate awareness of the challenge of underground infrastructure damage in Canada and to improve current damage prevention processes. Now is an opportune time to develop a national underground registry for several reasons. First, the damage prevention industry has reached an inflection point. For more than half a decade, the rate of damage to underground infrastructure in North America has increased or remained stagnant. The North American one call system has become highly inefficient and industry confidence in the system has been eroded. Second, recent developments is several jurisdictions are showing that the barriers to the development of such as system are surmountable.  Thirdly, new innovative technical developments are making to possible to detect, capture and share underground information more efficiently and accurately than ever before.

A centralized national map of underground infrastructure accessible all construction stakeholders provides systemic benefits with a large ROI for the construction industry, as well as economic and societal benefits.  To provide governance for and an implementation of a national register of underground infrastructure location data requires a trusted, centralized organization. A key criterion for choosing an organization structure is that it must be capable of achieving as near to 100 % participation as possible among utility and telecom network owners, government agencies, design engineering firms, contractors, surveyors, SUE engineers, locators and others. In North America many construction stakeholders are familiar with their state or provincial one call system which could provide the foundation for a national register that would minimize the changes required from current practice.

An appropriate funding model is required that reflects the importance of the register as an essential public service, contributing billions of dollars to the national economy and providing important benefits to Canadian society as a whole. Specifically the funding model should be able to support a dynamic organization, not only be able to support operations but also to provide for innovation.

Several capabilities are essential for making such a register effective. Open and transparent governance is a key requirement. Organizations such as utilities and telecoms who contribute and share their data need to know that the register provides a secure environment with data protection and a legal framework with agreed rules for how data is to be shared. Another is responsibility for data quality, in which professional surveyors, professional engineers and locators will play key roles.

A national underground infrastructure register would not only contribute billions of dollars to the economy, improve construction productivity and provide important societal benefits to Canadians, but it would also provide significant benefits to individual stakeholder groups: contractors, government transportation and infrastructure agencies, network owners, engineering design firms, and provide large opportunities for SUE engineers, surveyors and locators.

If you would like to get involved in the project, please contact Steve Slusarenko and we will provide materials with more details on our objectives and how we're planning to achieve them. Our goal is to enlist all stakeholder groups to help us put this together to everybody's benefit.

This article is based on the panel discussion on Developing a digital twin for Canada at the Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF). The Moderator was Steve Slusarenko and the panellists were Lawrence Arcand, president of 4Sight Utility Engineers, vice-chair of the CSA S-250 committee, and chair of the Transportation Association of Canada's (TAC) Public Utilities Management Subcommittee, Wilson Phillips, representing Professional Surveyors Canada and who has been working on finding a solution for managing underground infrastructure data in Canada for a decade, and Geoff Zeiss, Principal at Between The Poles, who has been following and documenting underground infrastructure data systems worldwide for 25 years.

Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum - Speakers for Day 2 March 23

The Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF), Mar 22-23, 2022 is a free virtual conference that brings together individuals and organizations to share information about and contribute to improving the mapping of underground infrastructure. The priority use cases are reducing damage to underground utilities during construction and the development of subsurface digital twins.

Speakers Wednesday March 23

10:00 AM EDT - Keynote: Utility Mapping Ecosystem to Support Digital Workflows, Victor Khoo, Singapore Land Authority

10:45 AM EDT - National Underground Asset Register; Applying real data to a data model, Amy Manefield, Geospatial Commission NUAR

11:30 AM EDT - Locating Underground Infrastructure Using a Drone, Luigi Kassir, Co-founder and COO, Skipper NDT

12:15 PM EDT - Eliminating the As-Built Update Backlogs by Automating Field Data Capture, Peter Batty, SSP innovations

1:00 PM EDT - UNUM: NYU's Approach to Underground Infrastructure Interoperability in NYC, Rae Zimmerman New York University, Alan Leidner GISMO, and Wendy Dorf GISMO

1:45 PM EDT - Best Practices for Underground Mapping: Combining Traditional Methods with Advanced Utility Locating and Mapping Technologies, Michael Twohig & Mitchell Liddell, Subsurface Utility Mapping DGT Associates

2:30 PM EDT - Augmented Reality in Subsurface Utility Mapping, Michael Bundock, CEO & Founder, Augview Ltd

3:15 PM EDT - Construction planning and execution with infrastructure mapping, Moufid Charafeddine, CEO, BetterGIS

4:00 PM EDT - NJ DOT's Proactive Approach to Reduced Underground Utility Damages Using IMU Mapping Tools, Santosh Saride, PRISUM Technologies

It's free and you can register here.

The Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF), Mar 22-23, 2022 is a free virtual conference that brings together individuals and organizations to share information about and contribute to improving the mapping of underground infrastructure. The priority use cases are reducing damage to underground utilities during construction and the development of subsurface digital twins.

Speakers Wednesday March 23

10:00 AM EDT - Keynote: Utility Mapping Ecosystem to Support Digital Workflows, Victor Khoo, Singapore Land Authority

10:45 AM EDT - National Underground Asset Register; Applying real data to a data model, Amy Manefield, Geospatial Commission NUAR

11:30 AM EDT - Locating Underground Infrastructure Using a Drone, Luigi Kassir, Co-founder and COO, Skipper NDT

12:15 PM EDT - Eliminating the As-Built Update Backlogs by Automating Field Data Capture, Peter Batty, SSP innovations

1:00 PM EDT - UNUM: NYU's Approach to Underground Infrastructure Interoperability in NYC, Rae Zimmerman New York University, Alan Leidner GISMO, and Wendy Dorf GISMO

1:45 PM EDT - Best Practices for Underground Mapping: Combining Traditional Methods with Advanced Utility Locating and Mapping Technologies, Michael Twohig & Mitchell Liddell, Subsurface Utility Mapping DGT Associates

2:30 PM EDT - Augmented Reality in Subsurface Utility Mapping, Michael Bundock, CEO & Founder, Augview Ltd

3:15 PM EDT - Construction planning and execution with infrastructure mapping, Moufid Charafeddine, CEO, BetterGIS

4:00 PM EDT - NJ DOT's Proactive Approach to Reduced Underground Utility Damages Using IMU Mapping Tools, Santosh Saride, PRISUM Technologies

It's free and you can register here.

Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum - Speakers for Day 1 March 22

The Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF), Mar 22-23, 2022 is a free virtual conference that brings together individuals and organizations to share information about and contribute to improving the mapping of underground infrastructure. The priority use cases are reducing damage to underground utilities during construction and the development of subsurface digital twins.

Speakers Tuesday March 22

9:45 AM EDT Opening Remarks, Geoff Zeiss and Jonathan Murphy

10:00 AM EDT Reducing Damage to Underground Utility Networks, the French National DT DICT System, Patrice Lemire, Directeur Général GEOSYSTEMS France

10:45 AM EDT Live-Dig-Radar™: The first-ever GPR integrated in an excavator Digging Bucket, Yuval Barnea, Rod Radar

11:30 AM EDT Product-as-a-Service: A Paradigm Shift in the world of Gyro-Mapping, Otto Ballintijn, CEO Reduct NV

12:15 PM EDT New Standards for Utility Infrastructure Data, Philip Meis, Owner Utility Mapping Services

1:00 PM EDT Creating the 3D Utility Digital Twin, Joseph Hlady, President, LuxModus

1:45 PM EDT Dropping the Curve, Jonathan Wagner, CEO Scribble Maps

2:30 PM EDT The "Z" factor - Mapping the Above & Underground for all !, Bill McIntyre, Prostar Geocorp Inc., 

3:00 PM EDT How to Optimize the Asset Booking Process with Digital Construction Management Tools, Locusview

4:00 PM Panel: Developing a subsurface digital twin for Canada

Moderator Steve Slusarenko
Panellists: Gord Reynolds, Infrastructure Ontario, Wilson Phillips, Professional Surveyors of Canada, Lawrence Arcand, 4Sight Utility Engineers

 

You can register here.

Subsurface digital twins: How Singapore plans to address data quality and accessibility challenges

TThe recently published Digital Underground: Imagining a digitally enabled future is full of insights derived from a four year effort by the Singapore Land Authority in developing a road map for a coherent national mapping strategy for underground utilities and, most recently, supporting an ecosystem to produce and deliver accurate and complete digital data to stakeholders..

The recognition that the quality of the existing data about underground infrastructure represents a major inhibitor to developing a reliable subsurface digital twin is a central theme. For example, the Singapore Digital Underground document states that "virtually all stakeholders are aware that much of the available information is unreliable and that this has repeatedly led to losses of time, money and opportunities."

Another challenge is accessing underground infrastructure data.  In many jurisdictions worldwide including Singapore records of the location of utility and telecom networks and facilities are often owned and maintained by private utility and telecom operators.  The result is that access to underground infrastructure data is often restricted and not available to all stakeholders on construction projects. Jurisdictions have addressed the accessibility problem through organizational structures that often involve government such as government mandated one call systems in North America and the DT DICT system in France. Systems that are not mandated by government have been developed, for example, the private one call system LineSearchBeforeYouDig in England and the industry voluntary Vault system in Scotland.

The Singapore Digital Underground project identified measures that it considers necessary to address these challenges. Current business practices for data production, data management, data sharing, and data use are largely dependent on individual land administrators, network owners, contractors and surveyors and are not consistent for all stakeholders.  The result is that every day significant effort and resources have to be invested to work around the lack of reliable information about underground infrastructure.

Data accessibility for all stakeholders

The foundation for addressing the data accessibility issue in Singapore is a new subsurface utilities data governance framework. Among other measures it provides a basis for making government and network owners' data accessible to all stakeholders. The UK's National Underground Register (NUAR) initiative has an analogous framework in the form of data sharing agreements that were signed among 40 or so utilities and government agencies during the pilots in the North East of England and Central London and enabled data sharing among all the participants.  Achieving a long term framework of this type for the nearly 700 network owners is a top priority of the NUAR implementation, currently underway in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

In Colorado enabling access to underground utility data initially involved requiring contractors working on public construction projects for the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) to use a mobile+cloud solution developed for CDOT. The source of the data was SUE surveys and high accuracy as-builts mandated by recent state legislation and regulations. It did not include data of uncertain reliability maintained in utility and telecom GISs. Sometime later network owners with equipment and locators and others working in the state ROW were also required to use the same mobile+cloud solution providing all stakeholders on CDOT construction projects access to the same high accuracy data. 

Improving data quality

The biggest challenge with existing underground data, generally stored in network owners' utility GISs, is that the data is often inaccurate, out of date or simply missing. A key question for any jurisdiction attempting to create a subsurface digital twin is whether to rely on unreliable data from network owners' records or to create a new high accuracy database with new data, for example, from recent SUE surveys or survey-grade as-builts.

Some jurisdictions such as Vault in Scotland and the NUAR initiative in the UK rely on the network documentation captured and maintained by network owners. Utilities have processes for updating and improving the quality of their data. These are supplemented by the NUAR application support for feedback from the field - implemented as "observations" in the online application developed by the Ordnance Survey for the pilots.

Other jurisdictions such as Colorado have decided not to rely on utility and telecom GIS data but to build new high accuracy databases using the results of recent SUE surveys and survey-grade as-builts with known quality levels, defined by ASCE 38-22 and ASCE 75-22.

Singapore has had a contractual standard for survey-quality as-builts since 2017. The key provisions of the new data governance proposal are designed to improve data quality and to establish an authoritative single source of truth.  Specifically it introduces the concept of a national Data Quality Hub which is comprised of a consolidated underground infrastructure database and data flows that are designed to co-exist with Singapore's current utility data workflows but which enforce data quality management.  The Data Quality Hub requires the digital submission of all newly captured data on subsurface utilities, quality control of submitted data based on a common set of rules, and the consolidation and integration of newly collected and legacy data for legacy data quality improvement. 

Integrating new high accuracy data with legacy data

For jurisdictions with new sources of high accuracy data from new legislation and regulations that are developing high accuracy databases, a crucial question is whether to attempt to integrate the unreliable data from network owners into these new databases.  In Colorado, the data from the mandatory SUE surveys and high accuracy as-builts with assigned quality standards based on ASCE 38-22 and ASCE 75-22 that goes into the new database is also made available to network owners who can use it to correct and update their records, but are not required to.

Singapore's approach is to require all data going into the Data Quality HUB to pass the set of quality rules defined by the new data governance framework.  If combining legacy data with new data, for example, from SUE surveys or from surveys of recently exposed underground utilities, results in data that can pass the quality rules then it is expected that that data should be eligible to be integrated into the Data Quality Hub.

A second challenge is that most legacy data is 2D and does not include depth or elevation.  The Singapore Digital Underground project attempted to address this issue by suggesting several ways of generating 2.5D data from legacy 2D data, but none of these is capable of producing the reliable data that the quality rules would seem to require.

Conclusion

Singapore has recognized the implications of the problems resulting from inaccurate, outdated and incomplete maps of underground infrastructure and adopted a comprehensive approach for addressing data quality and access issues. Because of the approach that Singapore has adopted and the fact that the Digital Underground project has actively engaged the international community, many international jurisdictions are watching closely as Singapore moves into the implementation phase.

Challenges of subsurface digital twins

The subsurface is composed up man made infrastructure; utility, transportation, and other infrastructure and the natural environment comprised of geology and geotechnical properties of the subsurface. A comprehensive subsurface digital twin requires a digital twin of underground infrastructure and a geology digital twin.

Digital twins of the underground infrastructure; utilities, communications, and transportation networks and other infrastructure, of cities, regions and nations have become a priority for many jurisdictions around the world. Over the past decade the emphasis has been on above-ground models, primarily because of the availability of technologies for efficiently capturing high accuracy location data for above ground infrastructure. However, many jurisdictions are recognizing the critical importance of below ground infrastructure and are integrating subsurface infrastructure into their digital twins.

Geological information, such 3D models of geological and geotechnical properties, and borehole databases, comprise an information product that has not yet reached its anticipated level of usage. Geological information has the potential to be useful in a wide range of broad use cases such as city planning, infrastructure construction projects, geohazard identification, environmental impact assessment and the development of water supply facilities, but to date this has not become standard best practice in these application areas. However, there is growing awareness of the importance of subsurface geology (in general but also to the technology used to detect and locate underground infrastructure) and it is expected that in the near future geology digital twins will be recognized as a foundation digital twin equally important to infrastructure digital twins.

Subsurface infrastructure digital twins

Digital models of underground infrastructure is characterized by important distinguishing features that differentiate them from above ground digital models and that need to be taken into account when maintaining and using models of underground infrastructure. These fall into the general categories of fitness for purpose, data quality, and accessibility.

Many cities, for example, Rotterdam, Helsinki, Pilsen, Athens, Rostock, Berlin and London to name a few, regions, such as Flanders, and nations such as the Netherlands, Estonia, Singapore, and the UK are developing 3D geometric models as a basis for digital twins. 3D models of above-ground infrastructure include buildings, transportation networks, parks, and other infrastructure typically captured in 2D or 3D imagery from overflights or in 2D GIS maps. But for a number of reasons underground infrastructure is often neglected, even though it is recognized that water and wastewater, energy (gas, electric power, and district heating), and communications (fibre and copper) networks provide the life blood of the city.

There is now a consensus that modeling a city requires not only information about buildings and transportation networks, but also about the utilities and communications networks. Utility and communications network operators maintain extensive records of their assets, including the location of their assets and operating, inspection, and maintenance data. For years they have used monitoring, control and simulation software for tracking and modeling demand, network energy, water, and gas flows, voltage, and pressure and other features of the modern utility networks. Utilities are expanding this capacity and moving in the direction of digital twins that can represent the entire utility system.  Ultimately this will enable them to support digital twin use cases that extend beyond utility asset management and network simulation to incorporate models of the entire utility network including demand and the supply chain. Digital replicas of energy infrastructure  makes it possible to undertake energy network sizing and routing process analytics to help understand and appraise loads and design optimum energy networks based on actual demand, consumer services and evolving technical solutions. In the UK electricity and gas networks operators have launched a National Energy Systems Map (NESM), a proof-of-concept project that brings together network data from all of Britain’s electricity and gas network operators into a digital, whole-energy system map covering Great Britain. The objective of the pilot project is to give customers information about energy network assets, where those assets are located as well as who owns them and is intended to provide the basis for a digital twin of the UK's energy network.

5G is increasingly recognized as an essential national utility. Knowing the location of all infrastructure is critical to understanding where fiber optic cables and 5G antennae intersect with the people and places that need them. This presents a major challenge because many telcos do not have current, comprehensive data on overground and underground assets in an integrated, easily accessible and shareable format. Operators need comprehensive, accurate and current location-based information on underground fiber-optic networks in relation to all the critical services that depend on them.  This will require integrating live data from all assets in the field with the demand for services from customers.

Challenges of subsurface infrastructure

There is a fundamental difference in what jurisdictions are able to do with representations of above and below ground infrastructure. Above ground, whatever can be photographed or scanned in the public space; from the street, from an airplane or drone, or from a satellite, in 2D or 3D, is generally unrestricted in application.  It is necessary to remove recognizable people and vehicles for privacy reasons and there may be national security restrictions, but in general this data can be used without restriction to create an open, publicly available digital model or digital twin.  The accuracy of the above-ground data in digital twins is generally high - for digitally LiDAR scanned data accuracy even reaches the mm level.

Underground the situation is different. First of all, there are restrictions on access to underground infrastructure location data.  In many jurisdictions some or all of the underground infrastructure in the public right-of-way is privately owned.  Where cities own water and sewer services, this data may be open and publicly accessible, but electric power, gas, and telecom are often privately owned and private ownership imposes restrictions on public access to this data. For example, the City of Rotterdam has decided that a key requirement of its digital twin is open access to the public. But for underground infrastructure the city has had to recognize restrictions on access. About 2/3 of the underground utility data is open and accessible, but there are access restrictions on the remaining 1/3 because these represent privately owned facilities.

Another major challenge in most jurisdictions is data quality. Utility network documentation and records are not collected or maintained consistently, the level of accuracy varies, data is often out of date and for abandoned infrastructure frequently missing. Over the past decades electric, gas, water, and telecom utilities have poured millions into digitalizing the graphic design/work management and GIS/records management processes. But the decades-old as-builting process remains marred by manual paper-based processes that results in low data quality and which has ramifications for the construction industry and for society in general. One of reasons for low data quality of network documentation is that utility business models provide no direct incentives to improve their data at the scale required for a full solution. This is a complicated problem that may require government involvement through regulation, changes in industry best practices and new technologies. Jurisdictions such as Colorado, Montana, and Singapore have implemented regulations focused on improving data quality. New technologies such as reality capture with LiDAR or a handheld phone together with RTK and other technologies for accurate positioning and mobile+cloud solutions for capturing and sharing data in the field are enabling real-time high accuracy data capture during construction.

Return-on-investment studies of improving information about underground infrastructure

Return on investment (ROI) studies of the benefits of improving the mapping underground infrastructure on highway construction projects conducted since the late 1990s have consistently revealed a large return-on-investment. A U.S. Department of Transportation sponsored survey conducted by Purdue University in 1999 of quantifiable and qualitative savings estimated a total of US$4.62 in avoided costs for every US$1.00 spent on accurately locating underground infrastructure. Although qualitative savings (for example, avoided impacts on nearby homes and businesses) were not directly measurable, the researchers made the case that those savings were significant, and many times more valuable than the quantifiable savings. In 2007, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation commissioned Pennsylvania State University to study the savings on Pennsylvania highway projects and found a return on investment of US$21.00 saved for every US$1.00 spent for SUE when elevating the quality level of subsurface utility information using SUE. This significantly higher return on investment when compared to Purdue study is the result of maturation of process and a consideration of some of the qualitative savings in the Purdue study.

Fitness-for-purpose for subsurface utility models

Straits Times

For underground utilities the Open Geospatial Consortium's MUDDI underground standards project has identified important use cases for underground infrastructure location data including planning, reducing underground utility damage during construction, construction efficiency, asset management, emergency response, and disaster planning. Each use case has specific data requirements. For example, the planning use case may not require survey-grade location accuracy, it may only be necessary to refresh the data once or twice a year, and the level of detail may be low. Fitness-for-purpose for each use case will determine the quality of the data to be fed into the digital twin, the algorithms that model urban processes, the simulations that need to be supported and the analytics and visualization technology that makes the model cognitively easy and accessible to users.

The Netherlands, Helsinki, and Singapore have developed master plans for the subsurface that support multiple use cases. As an example, a number of years ago Singapore recognized the urgency for a map of its underground utilities for a number of purposes; planning, design, construction, ownership and maintenance of underground infrastructure. The Singapore Land Authority (SLA) initiated the Digital Underground project aimed at establishing an accurate, current, and complete map of subsurface utilities in Singapore that could be used for multiple use cases.

Priority use cases for subsurface utility models

However, the priority use cases for subsurface digital models in most jurisdictions are reducing underground utility damage during construction and construction efficiency. The simple reasons for this are economic. The cost of damage to underground infrastructure during construction amounts to tens of billions of dollars every year, injuries and fatalities of workers and the public, and delays and budget overruns on civil engineering construction projects. For this use case data accuracy, currency and completeness are essential requirements. Another issue specific to underground infrastructure is integration. In general each utility and telecom has a different data model, vocabulary, symbology, base map, standards for layout, and data protection guidelines. To integrate data from multiple organizations requires harmonizing these features in a common standard agreeable to all data providers.

Thus current geometric models of underground infrastructure will require important changes to enable them to be used as a basis for a subsurface digital twin. Digital twins are living models and need to reflect the changes in real time of the underlying assets. The key is to integrate live data from all subsurface assets and ensure that the geospatial systems modelling these networks share a common standard and are a ‘living document’ constantly drawing on current data and intelligence from the field. Databases of real time, high precision underground infrastructure data compliant with an agreed on standard are required. This requirement and new technology advances are driving fundamental changes to how data about underground infrastructure is captured and maintained.