Between the Poles

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

Locations of Cross Section surveyors' notebooks

At GITA 2018 in Phoenix, Bob Basques, GIS Systems Developer at the City of St Paul, described a system called COMPASS he and his team have developed that provides a shared, easy to use tool that allows city employees and the public access to all of the City's spatial and associated data including, for example, scans of surveyors' notebooks, 2.2 million street level photos, and permitting and licensing information from 200 different applications. Based completely on open source components the system is compact and efficient enough to run on a Raspberry Pi.

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

Location and maintenance data for each street light

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

Organizations participating in GeoMoose project

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

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

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

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

Locations of surveyors' notebooks

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

Digital images of surveyors' notebooks can be accessed

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

Key registry created in the Netherlands to help model the subsurface

Increasing urbanization throughout the world challenges the sustainable development and resilience of cities. Despite this, the importance of the ground beneath cities is often overlooked.  A lot of information about the underground is captured during excavation and drilling. But this data is typically stored in project or private databases and is not shared. Capturing this data in a shared, open database is a first step toward developing a model of the subsurface that can be reliably used for urban planning, design, construction and maintenance.  The Netherlands has recently embarked on a national program supported by legislation and standards to do just that.

At the preconference workshop “Utilizing subsurface data for urban planning, design, construction and maintenance” organized by Geodan and TNO at the GEO|Design+BIM conference in Amsterdam, Michiel van der Meulen of the COST Sub-Urban program presented an overview of a new program supported by legislation to develop and maintain an open database of information about the subsurface in the Netherlands.

Current data about the subsurface in the Netherlands comes from borehole logs, cone penetration tests, and groundwater measuring points. Most of the currently available information about the subsurface in the Netherlands comes from boreholes drilled typically to over 100 meters using light drilling equipment as well as some boreholes to much greater depths using heavy drilling equipment. This information is available for free through the DINOloket of the TNO, Geological Survey of the Netherlands.

Based on interpolating from the existing borehole data, there are several models of the subsurface in the Netherlands developed by the Geological Survey of the Nethelands. For example, there is a model of the subsurface down to 50 meters. It has a resolution of 100 by 100 by half a meter. It was intended to assist in identifying aquifers and gas fields. This is too course for city planning purposes. What an urban planner needs is much higher resolution and that will require more data.

In 2015 a new law was passed by the States General or parliament in the Netherlands creating a Basisregistratie Ondergrond (BRO) or Key Registry for the Subsurface. The law mandates that if you excavate or drill you have to share your data (relating to soils, geotechnics, and groundwater) with the registry. In addition if when using the data in the registry you find something is incorrect you have to report it. The registry is required to be open and accessible to all citizens of the Netherlands. This new registry will require new standards for recording data and there is a major effort underway in the Netherlands to develop these standards. The implementation of the new subsurface registry will begin in 2018.

The Key Registry for the Subsurface or BRO is intended to provide transparent and accessible information about the subsurface. It is subject to the government's open data policy. In addition to providing data for urban planning, design, construction and maintenance, it is intended to include an inventory of opportunities and risks relating to subsurface, provide data for sustainable water management and to support the governments goal of moving toward a carbon neutral economy at the national regional and local levels. It is also intended to reduce the costs associated with infrastructure management for soil remediation.

The overall goal is to initiate the process of organizing an information chain that will harness geological survey and city efforts in building databases and creating the necessary standards for information production about the subsurface. But to better serve cities with the subsurface information they need, Michiel van der Meulen said that we need to rethink geological mapping, rethink urban information management, and create new alliances among organizations involved in urban development. The new BRO key registry is an important first step in the process of developing models of the subsurface that can be joined seamlessly with above surface information to create the comprehensive digital twins that will be required by the smart cities of the future.

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. 

 

Perceptality: new laser scanning applications potentially transforming construction

At HxGNLive Juergen Dold, President of Hexagon Geosystems which is responsible for the Leica Geosystems brand, gave a talk about perception and reality.  Perception is how we see the world, but perceptions are subjective and are not always reliable.  Reality can be quite different.  If you have ever worn a pedometer,  you will know exactly what he is referring to - the actual number of steps you walked or ran is often quite different from what you think you did.  Until now measuring things in construction and other industries has been so laborious that it is frequently not done.  Decisions may end up based on the "biggest salary's" opinion.  With laser scanning, photogrammetry, UAVs and other technologies measuring things has become several orders of magnitude easier and we can replace some of our perceptions with reality - Juergen called it fusing reality and perception - and coined a new term for it perceptality.  Since as Peter Drucker said, you can't manage what you don't measure, increasing the reality domain at the expense of someone's perception has the potential to dramatically change construction.

Juergen provided several interesting real world examples of how this translates into practice.

1 Vegetation management for transmission lines - inspecting transmission lines for vegetation encroachment in North America is mandated by NERC.  This is typically an expensive, slow process involving a helicopter carrying a LiDAR camera.  To capture the necessary density of points to be able to identify cables, pylons, and different types of vegetation requires flying at low altitude.  With the latest single photon laser scanner (Leica SPL100), it is possible to collect 80 points per square meter (m²) flying at an altitude of 2,500 meters (about 8,000 ft) as opposed to 3 points per m² with traditional linear laser scanning.

2 Urban mapping - urban mapping can also be time consuming and expensive, but with multiple cameras including LiDAR, photography, and near infrared it is possible to capture a more realistic 3D representation faster.

3 Scanning industrial plants - Cepsa (Compañía Española de Petróleos, S.A.U.) is a Spanish energy company who are scanning their chemical plants which requires thousands of scans.  A major software advance (Leica Cyclone) allows them to automate the registration process saving a lot of time.

4 Forensics - scanners in backpacks (Pegasus Backpack) or handheld scanners make it possible to walk through the scene of an accident or crime and capture trusted data without disturbing the site.  The data can be used in scientific forensic analysis and to visualize the results of the analysis in court.

5 Digitalizing AEC - The construction industry is one of the most inefficient industries.  $10 trillion is spent on construction goods and services every year. But whereas the average worker adds $37 of value for every hour worked, a construction worker adds only $25 per hour worked. Construction productivity has stagnated over the past decades in many of the world's advanced economies.  To attract the private financing that is necessary to build and maintain the world's infrastructure will require improving productivity.  Digitization can play an important role in this process or even be disruptive (transformative) as it has been in other industries. Innovative firms have increased productivity by 50 to 60 percent by infusing digital technology, new materials, and advanced automation, reskilling the workforce, changing business practices and pushing government to change regulations.

Our existing stock of structures will be with us for many years to come.  Maintaining this infrastructure is currently inefficient and expensive.  New technology can dramatically change this by making renovation more efficient and affordable.  A first step is democratizing scanning.  I have blogged about the deluge of handheld, low cost scanners that are now available.  Many see handheld scanners as potentially revolutionizing the construction sector.  Mantis Vision has offered a handheld scanner F5 for professionals for several years.  Originally targetted on the real estate industry, the Matterport Pro allows you to scan a house in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later you will have a fully-rendered model that can be used for walkthroughs with potential buyers.  The Faro Freestyle is targetted on the architecture, accident reconstruction, civil engineering, construction, facility management, and industrial manufacturing sectors. 

I have blogged previously about the Leica Geosystems BLK360 and Cyclone Register 360  which together appear to be a game changer for professionals in construction.  It is a bit of a stretch to call it a handheld scanner, but it weighs only 2.2 lbs (1 kg) and is incredibly small 6.5 by 4 inches.  Unlike other "handheld" devices it is a full laser scanner and imager - it captures 360,000 points/second with a range of 0.6 - 60 meters with millimeter precision. It has three cameras, laser scanner, photo, and near infrared.  It's one button operation redefines simplicity.  It can capture a full 360 degree scan in less than 3 minutes.  Cyclone Register 360 allows automated registration of scans from many devices to be merged with "one-button" simplicity.

Developing a national 3D strategy in the Netherlands

At the GeoBIM Building and Infrastructure Conference in Amsterdam Rob van de Velde and Friso Penninga of Geonovum presented an overview of what has been achieved to date with respect to 3D data and technology at the national level in the Netherlands and what they see as the next major step, the development of a national 3D strategy. 

 

BIM and geospatial (2D and 3D) are key underpinnings of 3D.  The Netherlands has been at the forefront of implementing BIM in the construction industry.  Just as importantly in the long term, the Netherlands has been leading the geospatial-BIM integration initiative.  It has long been recognized that geospatial/BIM integration is essential for building and infrastructure operation and maintenance or what is referred to as full-lifecycle BIM.

 

Years ago private Dutch engineering and construction companies began adopting an integrated geospatial/BIM approach to construction.  I blogged previously about a 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 been leading 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 for management of open BIM standards in the Netherlands.  It provides a central information centre for open BIM standards including related geospatial standards. 

Geospatial

Within government the Environment Planning Act is responsible for a growing focus on the physical environment.  There is also a greater desire for an integrated approach to modeling the physical environment.  Citizens are asking questions that require accurate 3D modeling, for example, noise, air quality, light and shadow, and viewports.

There have been several initiatives at the national level in the Netherlands.

• 2010 3D pilot exploring possibilities of 3D including IMGeo and CityGML
• 2012 3D pilot exploring Geo-BIM integration
• 2014 "Breakthrough 3D" - application of 3D in many domains

The last "Breakthrough 3D" initiative revealed that 3D technology had matured and that there were many initiatives asking for uniform 3D data.

BIM

The Dutch Building Information Council (BIR) has been encouraging BIM for a long time - I blogged about BIR and BIM in the Netherlands previously.  One of my takeways from the recent RICS BIM conference in London was that there is a desperate need for standards, especially to classify the huge amount of date in addition to the 3D geometry that accumulates during a construction project.  Much of this data would be useful to the FM folks who are responsible for operating and maintaining the building after construction if it were accessible.

From both the perspective of geospatial data for modeling the environment and BIM data for modeling the built environment, it's time for the next step:  a government initiative for a national 3D strategy.  The concept is to create a 3D production chain, capable of creating timely, accurate and reliable 3D geo-information.

Gap analysis - what's available vs what's needed

The Netherlands has a digital elevation model ( AHN or Actual Height Model) with nationwide coverage but the update cycle is on the order of eight years.  What's needed is a nationwide point cloud that is updated at least once a year.  There are a number of ways including new technologies this could help achieve this.

The Netherlands has national 2D core data, large scale topographic data that is open and universally accessible.  It has no equivalent in 3D.  One way to generate this rapidly are reliable techniques for automating the extraction of buildings, infrastructure and natural features from point clouds.

The Netherlands has a national portal for disseminating 2D data.  The national geoportal PDOK has experienced  3-4 billion hits in 2016.  For 3D data, PDOK needs to be upgraded to be able to serve 3D data. 

 

For 3D data there are standards for exchanging 3D data about cities and BIM model such as CityGML and IFC.  What's needed are standards for distributing and viewing 3D data.  Another important outstanding challenge is developing an interface between CityGML and IFC.

Rob emphasized that developing a national 3D standard is about identifying and involving stakeholders, understanding user requirements, and realizing the individual components, but more importantly it is about aligning individual initiatives, thus optimizing 3D supply chain.

Mapping urban underground utility infrastructure with GPR

About three years ago at the GI_Forum Symposium in Salzburg, Paolo Viskanic of R3 GIS gave a presentation about a ground breaking project to map underground infrastructure that had been underway in the Region of Lombardy in Northern Italy.  This project was kicked off by a pilot project to map all underground infrastructure on the site of Expo Milano in preparation for the 2015 event in Milan.  

What I didn't realize at the time was that this was a joint presentation with Enrico Boi of IDS GeoRadar.  Enrico, who was responsible for the ground penetrating radar (GPR) scanning part of the project, wasn't able to make it to Salzburg.  Paulo explained to me repeatedly that I should talk to his co-author from IDS about the GPR scanning, but somehow I never managed to until last week.  At the annual Hexagon conference HxGN Live in Anaheim I finally met Enrico.  ( At HxGN Enrico gave a fascinating presentation on the application of radar to detect and monitor slope instabilities. )

In recent years IDS Georadar has been in the forefront of technical development in GPR and the Milan pilot project was a ground breaking project that demonstrated the benefits of using GPR to map underground utility infrastructure in an urban environment.  For the Milan pilot project all underground infrastructure in the project area (230 000 square meters) including electric power, water, sewers, gas, district heating, street lighting, and telecommunication were mapped both from historical records and using IDS's ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology.    A data model for underground infrastructure was developed for the different types of underground networks based on the Italian DigitPA and the INSPIRE US utility standards.

Comparison of GPR scan with historical records

The most fascinating part of the project was the comparison of the historical records with the results captured by GPR.  Enrico's analysis revealed significant discrepancies in the historic record including thousands of meters of unknown infrastructure.  For the known infrastructure the average error in geolocation was about 30%, but much larger errors of up to 100% were also recorded.  The conclusion is that even in Europe the record of underground infrastructure can be highly unreliable. 

 

In addition that GPR could identify previously unknown underground infrastructure can provide financial motivation for municipalities to invest in underground scanning because utilities are taxed by municipalities based on the total infrastructure the utilities maintain within city limits.

Return-on-investment

The other ground breaking part of the pilot project was an economic analysis of the costs and benefits of applying GPR to detect the location of underground infrastructure.  The analysis estimated that the return on investment is about €16 for every euro invested in improving the reliability information of underground infrastructure.  For comparison the ROI in the United States has been estimated to range from up to $21 for every dollar invested. The analysis also emphasized other important, but non-quantifiable benefits including better safety for both workers and the public as well as fewer traffic disruptions.

 

Hexagon has worked with IDS for years and is in the process of acquiring IDS' GeoRadar division, which developed and manufactures the Stream EM array among other radar technology. 

Crossrail's huge BIM+geospatial model targeted on operations and maintenance

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model, estimated at more than 40% savings, will be during operations and maintenance, typically representing 80% of the total cost of a facility.  Companies such as BAM who do Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) projects report significant benefits from full lifecycle BIM + geospatial.  But there is little if any quantitative evidence supporting this conjecture.  I have asked people from Finland familiar with the very early BIM developments in that country if there were studies of the benefits of BIM for operations and maintenance, but apparently the BIM focus there has been entirely on design and build.

 

Crossrail with a budget of £14.8 billion is the biggest engineering project in Europe.  It involves 42 km of tunnels beneath one of the most densely populated parts of Europe.  It has wider tunnels  and its 40 stations have longer station platforms than the Tube has.  Crossrail trains are expected to start running next year and the full network should be open by 2019.

 

But the most interesting aspect of the Crossrail project is a 3D digital model with associated asset data that has not only been used during design and construction, but is intended to be used for operations and maintenance.  Crossrail appears to be the first major project that may be able to provide support for the conjecture that the biggest benefits of BIM are for operations and maintenance.

 

The Crossrail model is comprised of spatial and non-spatial data with links between the two.  The spatial data is made up of more than 250,000 3D BIM models as well as as-builts, together comprising a few terabytes. As construction of each facility is completed as-builts are collected by point-cloud survey using laser scanners.  The point clouds captured in the survey are compared to the design and divergences that need resolving are recorded for fixing. The detailed asset data and documentation add an additional 5 terabytes.  This represents one of the World's largest BIM model.  A critical aspect of the spatial database is that all assets are geolocated so that workers can query a particular location of London on a map and then navigate to the Crossrail assets there.

 

The model is intended to become a crucial tool for monitoring, operating and maintaining Crossrail’s systems once the railway is running.  Sensors monitor various aspects of the railway's operation and remote-controlled devices can change operating parameters from a central control room or from a handheld device.  Managers can view this information within the 3D model and can zoom in on an area which needs attention.  Crossrail is testing low-power wireless smart sensors called Utterberries that can monitor strain, temperature, humidity, acceleration, and other aspects of a facility. Utterberries weigh 15 grams and are smart - they have an ARM processor on-board and can operate for more than a year on one charge.  One of the coolest capabilities of the digital infrastrucure is an augmented-reality interface which allows workers to hold an iPad up to a wall or floor and see a view of the infrastructure (electricity, water, and communications) under the floor or behind the wall.

One third of Be Inspired Awards involve mapping, managing, rehabbing and replacing aging infrastructure

Worldwide there is increasing demand from building and infrastructure owners for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a building or infrastructure. This represents a distinct break with the design/build tradition which has dominated construction for years.  At the Year in Infrastructure conference in London, a dominant theme was the growing recognition of the importance of full lifecycle management of infrastructure.  I found it symptomatic of the direction of the construction industry that fully one third of the 54 finalists for the annual Be Inspired Awards involved mapping, rehabbing, retrofitting, replacing and managing existing infrastructure.  This is my classification of these Be Inspired finalists;

Be Inspired Finalists

1 Full lifecycle workflow
2 Replacement
7 Renovation, rehab, retrofit
3 Mapping existing infrastructure
1 Historic site protection
5 Utility asset management

Full life cycle management

Patrick MacLeamy, Chairman of buildingSMART and CEO of HOK, has been pushing a very simple message about the U.S. construction industry for years.  Buildings are too expensive, are too inefficient to operate and maintain, and don't last long. As a result the U.S. construction industry is falling behind the Nordic countries, the U.K. and Singapore.  His solution is a full life cycle approach to construction.  Information has to be shared between owners, designers, contractors, operations and facilities management over the entire life cycle of the building or infrastructure.

Buildings

Over 50% of the cost of maintaining a building is operations and maintenance which is comprised of administration, maintenance and repairs, and restoration projects.  In several countries BIM has become essential for design and construction.  But many including the UK government believe that the full value of BIM can only be found during the operational life of the building where the majority of the life cycle costs occur.  The UK government has said that "the 20% saving refers to CapEx cost savings however we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle".

Road and highway infrastructure

Highway construction is being transformed, due in part to the arrival of autonomous vehicles.  I've blogged about the startling (at least to traditional construction contractors) vision of the future of highway construction of the Chief of Surveys at the Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) which targets the full lifecycle of highway assets from planning through design and construction and operation and maintainenance.  Some large construction projects are already being designed, built and operated and maintained with a full lifecycle perspective.

Utility infrastructure

Industry surveys report that up to 80 percent of a utility's resources and budget can be spent on operating and maintaining existing utility infrastructure.   Surveys also show that aging utility infrastructure is a top priority for most utilities.

Be Inspired Awards: Mapping, Monitoring, Rehabbing, and Replacing Infrastructure

One of the projects focused specifically on full lifecycle data management for highway construction.  The project, which was submitted by the Roads Directorate, Denmark, is for the $ 580 million 39-kilometer Herning – Holstebro highway which includes eight interchanges, four railway crossings, and five bridges.  The important achievement of the project was to create a digital workflow with meaningful requirements for sharing data among disciplines and across the entire project lifecycle.  The project was a finalist for the year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Roads.

Seven of the finalists' submissions involved renovation, rehabbing, and retrofit.  An outstanding example of a rehab project is the Bond Street to Baker Street Tunnel Remediation Project.  This is a London Underground  project in the UK.  It involved the replacement of the existing elastoplastic concrete lining of a 215-meter tunnel segment on the Jubilee Line with a spheroidal graphite iron lining - all while the line was running at full capacity.  This achievement won this year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Rail and Transit at the Year in Infrastructure 2015 conference.

Two of the finalists' projects involved replacement. An example of a replacement project was the Decommissioning and Replacement of Del Rio Bridge on US 20  this was carried out by Harper-Leavitt Engineering for the Idaho Transportation Department with minimum disruption to traffic.

Five of the finalists submitted projects that involved monitoring and extracting more value from existing transportation and utility infrastructure including rail, electric substations, electric and water and waste water distribution networks.

An example is a project submitted by SA Water which won the Be Inspired Innovation in Asset Performance Management Award.  The project involved integrating a hydraulic model and an operational analytics tool with network sensors to help them optimize their network.  These tools enable them to optimize chlorine dosing for different water sources (runoff, desalinization, rivers), minimize electric power costs, and improve water quality by mapping water age across their entire network. SA Water have not only been able to reduce their power bill by A$3 million, but also have cut their network operating costs by nearly a A$ million.  It has also resulted in improved water quality.  More fundamentally it has given them much greater insight into sources of revenue and the costs of various aspects of operating a water network.

Four of the finalist projects involved mapping and historic site protection.  An example is a gas main project submitted by Utility Mapping Services Inc.  This project involved creating a 3D map of underground utilities along a stretch of highway with complex utility infrastructure woven through dense commercial and residential areas with limited right-of-way and heavy traffic congestion.  Most critically from a safety perspective, there were no utility strikes on the project.  As a result the 3D model is credited with reducing construction time from 10 to 7 weeks.  Most importantly from a budget perspective, there were no change orders and the total cost of the project came in at 10-15% less than estimated in the absence of a 3D model.

Another example is a project submitted by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA).  Singapore intends to be the world's first "smart nation".  Part of this initiative involves developing a virtual Singapore that is intended to be the source of authoritative information about Singapore for use by government agencies.  The project involves capturing large amounts of data using multiple rapid mapping technologies including oblique imagery, airborne laser scanning, mobile laser scanning, and terrestrial scanning.  The data has been compiled into 3D city model in a single database repository which includes geometry, topology, semantics and appearance.  The database relies on CityGML, a standard managed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), for the database schema and for data exchange.  The total volume of data is more than 50 terabytes. The database is open and accessible to all government agencies. The most challenging part of the project has been the development of business processes and technologies for ensuring the data remains current.  At the the Year in Infrastructure conference in London the SLA the won the annual Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Government.

INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum 2015 program released

INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum 2015, a joint conference organized by the European Commission and Geospatial Media and Communications, has made available its full conference program. Almost 500 presentations are scheduled on topics including building information modelling (BIM), open data, big data analytics, open standards, linked data, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Earth observation, indoor positioning, land information systems for smart cities, urban resilience and sustainability, health, agriculture and others.  Some 2000 delegates are expected to attend from more than 80 countries.  Top sponsors include Trimble, Topcon, ESRI, Digital Globe, Oracle and Bentley.

The theme of the conference is CONVERGENCE: Policies + Practices + Processes via PPP with a focus on improving coordination among policy-makers, technology providers and users.  Including geospatial data and technology in construction, agriculture, health and other industry workflows is an enabler for more successful public–private partnerships (PPP) by facilitating more informed decision making among the stakeholders.

Smart cities market forecasted to reach over $ 1 trillion by 2019

Urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon.  Smart city technology is becoming an essential element in the development of the world's megacities.  For example, the new Indian government's just released budget includes an allocation for initiating the development of 100 smart cities.  Songdo IDB in Korea and Fujisawa in Japan are two smart cities already under development. China has 36 smart cities in development and a low carbon model city in Tianjin.  Singapore plans to become a smart nation by 2015.  Iskandar is Malaysia's first smart city.  The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) incorporates smart city concepts. 

According to the report "Smart Cities Market - Worldwide Market Forecasts and Analysis (2014 - 2019)", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global smart cities market is forecasted to grow from $410 billion in 2014 to $1.1 trillion by 2019 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5%.  This includes smart homes, intelligent building automation, energy management, smart health, smart education, smart water, smart transportation, smart security, and related services.  Most of this activity is expected to occur in Asia and the Middle East.

Navigant Research forecasts that cumulative global investment in smart city technologies, including smart grid, advanced water monitoring systems, transportation management systems, and energy efficient buildings, could total $174.4 billion from 2014 to 2023, growing from $8.8 billion annually in 2014 to $27.5 billion in 2023.  Navigant forecasts that annual smart city technology investment in Asia Pacific will increase from $3.0 billion in 2014 to reach $11.3 billion in 2023.

What are cities already doing ?

In a recent study by Arup and University College London, Delivering the Smart City, the researchers analysed the spending patterns of eight U.K. cities; Leicester City Council, Manchester City Council, Leeds City Council, Portsmouth City Council, Sheffield City Council, Liverpool City Council, Bristol City Council and Coventry City Council.  These are medium-sized cities with populations between 200,000 and 760,000. 

This type of analysis has become much easier because of the open data movement in the U.K. which has generated significant amounts of accessible  data about government spending and procurement.   The analysis showed that the eight cities were spending on average 6% of their expenditure on information technology (IT). That's an average of £23 million a year on IT.  Four of the eight spent between 8 and 10% of their budgets on IT. To put this in context the proportion that these city governments are spending on IT is more than many industries and is comparable to the banking and financial services industry which spends on average 8% of operating expenditure on IT.

This research shows that cities are already investing a significant amount on something which is a foundation for smart city technology.  IT already underpins many services offered by city governments today including public security and health, transportation, public works, natural resource management, and permitting and licensing.

Other research also shows that city governments globally are spending a significant proportion of their budgets on IT.  Gartner analysed the IT spending patterns of 99 local governments across 80 countries in the U.S. and found that that IT accounted for 3.8% of their total operating expenses.  U.S. local governments, including 3,200 counties and 19,000 cities, spent approximately $34 billion on traditional IT goods and services in 2013. 

According to Gartner national and regional governments in the Middle East and North Africa will spend US $12.2 billion on IT products and services in 2014, up 1.3 % from 2013. This includes internal services, software, IT services, data center, devices and telecom services.  Saudi Arabia is investing in various digital government initiatives including King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC).  The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is planning multiple smart cities.

City governments are not the only organizations providing IT services to support city operations.  For example, installation of 5,000 smart meters in homes and businesses across London involved investment from private companies including EDF Energy, Siemens, Logica, as well as the electricity transmission and network operators, National Grid and U.K. Power Networks, the transport operator Transport for London, and the city government Greater London Authority.

The U.S. spending analysis also showed that local governments, in addition to more traditional IT products and services, are procuring cloud-based services to modernize citizen services and reduce operational costs.  An example is online portals for tax collection and business licensing.  These IT projects are usually part of wider modernization projects being carried out within departments rather than standalone technology initiatives at the city level.

UK city governments buy IT products and services from large vendors

City governments in the U.K. tend to purchase their IT products and services from large vendors.  According to the UK analysis of eight cities large and middle-sized vendors accounted for the overwhelming majority of IT spending (98%) with small businesses only accounting for 2%.