Between the Poles

Documenting construction projects with a consumer 360° camera

Many see handheld scanners as revolutionizing the construction sector.  Portable and handheld laser scanners offer millimeter accuracy and can be used for engineering purposes.  Cameras with less precision are being used for rapidly documenting a construction site for a variety of purposes.   Most recently a couple of startups Cupix and HoloBuilder are lowering the bar by offering cloud software for the AEC industry to enable images of a construction site to be captured with a consumer grade 360° camera like the Ricoh Theta S or V. Walking through a construction site capturing 360° images along the way and uploading the images to the web is all that is required to create 3D walk-throughs of a site.  The 3D walk-through can be used to measure dimensions, it can be annotated, it can be compared with a BIM model, and 3D images captured at different times can be compared to monitor construction progress.

 

For engineering purposes, handheld laser scanners provide the requisite precision but are relatively expensive.  The scanning process requires time and produces large point cloud files and imagery that need to be managed and processed for visualization.

• The Leica Geosystems BLK360 weighs a mere 2.2 lbs (1 kg), is incredibly small 6.5 x 4 inches and lists for US$16,000.  It is a full laser scanner and imager, capturing 360,000 points/second with a range of 0.6 - 60 meters.  The scanner can be attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet to visualize what you have scanned. Up to 16 of these can be used at the same time.
• Dot Product DPI-8 and DPI-8X (short range) are multi-sensor devices (IR laser and photo cameras).  Targeted at professionals, especially in the engineering and construction sector, the devices incorporate SLAM technology and works with Android handhelds.  All the processing is done locally on the handheld - no cloud processing is required.
• The Faro Freestyle can scan objects within a range of half a meter to 3 meters away with a resolution of  better than 1.5mm with a image point density of up to 45,000 points/m² at 0.5m and up to 10,500 points/m² at 1m.  The scanner is attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet for visualizing the point cloud as you scan.

For rapid site documentation, Matterport allows you to scan a floor of a building in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later have a fully-rendered 3D walk-through that can be accessed over the web.  It was originally targeted on the real estate sector but recently has been showing up at construction industry and other events including the recent BIMForum in Las Vegas.  It provides a dollhouse view to see a whole floor at once, an inside view for walk-throughs, and a floor plan view for a traditional top-down perspective. It relies on IR and photo cameras and multiple scans in each room - scanning every 1.5 to 2.5 meters.  It is capable of rough measurement, but not for engineering or construction purposes.  Its biggest advantages are the speed with which you can scan a site and the small size of the resulting file which has to be uploaded to Matterport's cloud site.  In addition to real estate and construction site documentation, it is used by FM professionals who need a 3D context for facilities management.  For example, it can provide a mechanical room walk through with tags on different pieces of equipment and a way of directing anyone to any location in the facility.  The camera is several thousand dollars and cloud processing requires a subscription.

 

The most recent additions to the technologies that can be used to document a construction site are Cupix and Holobuilder which lower the bar by only requiring a consumer grade 360° camera such as a Ricoh Theta.  In the case of Cupix cloud processing requires a subscription.  Similarly to the Matterport, you walk through the site capturing images with 360° camera as you go.  The resulting images are uploaded to the Cupix site and the result is 3d tours or walk-throughs accessible over the web.  You can compare 3D tours taken on different days to monitor construction progress, compare a 3D walk-through with a BIM model (Revit or IFC) you have uploaded, and measure dimensions with a precision of 1% or better at 20 meters.  To reach this level of precision in measurement requires including a marker when taking pictures.  Alternatively if a dimension is known it can be used to scale the entire walk-through.  Cupix can use images captured indoors and outdoors.  Cupix says that if GPS metadata is available from the photos, they can georeference the walk-throughs and generate a KML file. I used Cupix with a low cost 360Fly4K camera and a Samsung Note 5 phone to capture the interior and a bit outside of a cabin in a nearby park.  It took a couple of attempts to get the correct spacing between camera placements in capturing 360° images, but after that it was straightforward. I uploaded a rough picture of a floor plan and I was able to walk-through the resulting 3D tour using the Cupix web viewer.  Without doing anything additional I was able to get rough measurements accurate to about 5%.  Cupix only requires a consumer grade 360° camera.  A subscription is necessary for cloud processing. Cupix is targeting a broad market including travel and hospitality, real estate, and arts and culture in addition to the AEC industry

 

I just came across HoloBuilder at the recent BIMForum in Las Vegas.  Like Cupix it only requires a consumer 360° camera. At first glance it appears to be focused on the AEC industry and makes creating and managing 3D tours of construction sites very easy.  It offers 360° SiteStream which is a unique live streaming solution for real-time construction progress monitoring in 3D that runs as a plug-in app on the Ricoh Theta V.

Towards a digital twin of infrastructure: on the cusp of efficient reality capture of underground utilities

Public safety is at risk whenever the location of underground infrastructure is unknown or inaccurately known. For example, in Belgium workers on a construction project rupture a high pressure gas line they did not know was in the vicinity and the resulting explosion results in fatalities and injuries.   Or a house explodes when a gas line penetrates a sewer line during trenchless horizontal drilling and an attempt is made to clear the resulting obstruction with an augur.  Or it requires hours to identify the source of an explosion in a residential neighbourhood in San Bruno, California which caused fatalities. Similar events have occurred in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Allentown, Pennsylvania, Bellingham, Washington, El Paso, Texas, Saudi Arabia and a number of other locations.

Damages and delays connected with underground utilities during construction represent at a minimum a $50 billion drag on the U.S. economy.  For example, a project in Sydney, Australia to extend a light rail transit system encountered many unknown underground utilities during construction which delayed the project by one and half years. In the U.S., a leading cause of highway construction delays is missing or inaccurate information about the location of underground utilities. To address the risk of liabilities associated with unknown or inaccurately located underground utilities, contractors regularly increase bid costs by a minimum of 10-30%. 

A digital twin of the underground would eliminate or ameliorate these issues.  Creating a digital twin requires addressing challenges.  First of all, considerable effort goes into detecting the location of underground utilities in preparation for and during construction on virtually all projects, but this data is rarely shared.  If a way could be found to share this data, not only would contractors not have to rediscover the location of underground utilities over and over again, but over time a 3D map of underground infrastructure would emerge at no significant additional cost to construction contractors.  Secondly, a technological advance is required that enables the efficient, safe and rapid capture and processing of remote sensed data to create accurate 3D maps of the underground.  Recently there have been advances in addressing both of these issues that provide grounds for optimism that we are close to being able to cost-effectively create a digital twin of underground infrastructure. 

Putting this in the context of smart cities, where data in the form of a national digital twin becomes just as important as physical assets, it is essential that a national digital twin include above and below ground assets. Fundamental to this process is rethinking value, not just the value of a finished building or infrastructure asset, but over the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset. Furthermore, managing this data cost-effectively requires finding ways to integrate data and services relating to the underground with other city data.

Why a digital twin of underground infrastructure is important

The impact of poor information about the location of underground utilities is exemplified in the Sydney Light Rail Project.  This is a $2.1 billion PPP project for a 12 km of light rail extension in Sydney, Australia to be completed by 2019. In preparation for construction a year was allocated for identifying potentially conflicting utilities in the proposed right of way. About 500 subsurface utilities were identified and scheduled for relocation. During construction a further 400 unmapped utility services were encountered. An economic impact study by an independent consulting firm estimated that the project could have been completed at least one and a half years sooner if a complete and reliable 3D map of underground infrastructure had been available at the project planning stage.

In the U.S. underground utilities are a leading causes of highway construction delays.  Almost all construction projects for buildings or infrastructure contain a design constraint: existing utilities strung overhead on visible structures or hidden underground.  The traditional strategy for the highway designer has been to ignore utilities during design. Prior to construction utilities in the areas were requested to locate any of their underground infrastructure in the proposed right of way. Utilities are routinely relocated, often at great expense, often unnecessarily and often negatively impacting budget and schedule of the construction project. A more cost-effective alternative “design-to-accommodate” is to locate utilities first and then design the highway to avoid them, but that requires reliable information about where the utilities are located. This is rarely available. Between the two alternatives of relocating utilities and designing the highway to avoid utilities whose location is poorly known designers try to find a workable compromise that meets the highway construction scope and mission, while minimizing impacts to utility facilities. If successful, this can result in substantial savings in utility relocation costs and impacts, as well as overall savings to the project budget and timeline.  A survey has found that state departments of transportation (DOTs) overwhelmingly would like to get utilities involved as early as possible to reduce project risk by determining what utility infrastructure is present in the project area and where it is located. The study found that there is a general consensus that this would help make better decisions regarding relocation versus design-to-accommodate. When comprehensive and accurate utility location data is available, better decisions can be made, and the risk of unforeseen problems due to utilities emerging during the construction phase are reduced.

According to the Common Ground Alliance (CGA), in the United States an underground utility line is hit on average every 60 seconds, that is 390,366 hits in 2016. In addition there is always the risk of injuries and fatalities. I have estimated that the total cost to the national economy is over $50 billion. The problem is a location one; we simply don't know where our underground infrastructure is.  In most municipalities in North America underground utility lines have been put in the ground not according to plan but wherever it has been easiest and cheapest to build them. As a result 2D as-builts of underground infrastructure are notoriously unreliable. Neither the local municipality or the utility network owner know the location of underground utilities.

Construction bids routinely include an added cost, which can amount to 10%-30% of the bid cost, to cover the risk associated with underground utilities. In spite of the effort in locating underground infrastructure that is part of virtually every construction project the information is rarely shared and as a result the location of the same underground utilities is often captured over and over again for different construction projects.

As a result locating underground utilities is an essential part of every construction project involving excavation and has become a major industry in the U.S. The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) which is an association of companies and practitioners in North America reports 1700 members in the U.S. and Canada. The last CGA annual conference and exhibition attracted 800 attendees and over a hundred exhibitors which gives a feeling for the size of the locate sector.

In the UK about 4 million excavations are carried out every year on the UK road network to install or repair buried utility pipes and cables. Not knowing the location of buried assets causes practical problems that increase costs and delay projects, but more importantly, it increases the risk of injury for utility owners, contractors and road users. The problems associated with inaccurate location of buried pipes and cables are serious and are rapidly worsening due to the increasing density of underground infrastructure in major urban areas. Research at the University of Birmingham has determined the direct costs of utility strikes in the U.K.

Facility	Avg cost per strike
Electricity	£ 970
Gas	£485
Telecom	£400
Fibre-optic	£2800
Water	£300-980

The researchers have found that the true costs, including indirect and social costs, associated with utility strikes is 29 times the direct cost.

In the U.S. the Common Ground Alliance reports that there were 390,366 documented underground utility hits in 2016. The average costs of the damage for each utility hit were calculated for different types of underground infrastructure.

Facility		Avg cost per damage 2016
Natural gas		$5,914.00
Telecom		$3,022.00
Electric		$4,905.00
Cable TV		$2,190.00
Water		$3,003.00
Sewer		$5,163.00
Liquid pipeline		$7,711.00
Steam		$1,800.00
Average		$4,021.00

At an average cost of $4000 per hit, the CGA estimates that the direct cost to the U.S. Economy was $1.5 billion. The CGA emphasizes that this is a conservative minimum estimate and does not include indirect and social costs such as property damage, evacuations, traffic disruption, road closures, resulting lost business, environmental impacts, lawsuits, injuries, and fatalities. If the ratio of total to direct cost determined by the researchers at the University of Birmingham is applicable to the US, it would mean that the total estimated impact of unknown or poorly located underground infrastructure on the U.S. economy is over $50 billion.

Return-on-investment of accurately mapping underground utilities

University research has put a dollar figure on the benefits of accurate location data for underground utilities.

According to a USDOT sponsored survey conducted by Purdue University in 1999, two broad categories of savings emerged from using SUE — quantifiable and qualitative savings. The Purdue study quantified a total of US$4.62 in avoided costs for every US$1.00 spent on SUE. Although qualitative savings (for example, avoided impacts on nearby homes and businesses) were not directly measurable, the researchers believed those savings were significant, and arguably many times more valuable than the quantifiable savings.

In 2004 in Canada, the Ontario Sewer and Watermain Contractors Association commissioned the University of Toronto to investigate the practice of using SUE on large infrastructure projects in Ontario. This study, entitled Subsurface Utility Engineering in Ontario: Challenges and Opportunities, determined that the average rate of return for each dollar spent on SUE services on those projects that could be quantified was $3.41.

In 2007, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation commissioned Pennsylvania State University to study the savings on Pennsylvania highway projects that used SUE in accordance with the mapping provisions of the American standard. In their unpublished report, Subsurface Utility Engineering Manual, Pennsylvania State University 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.

In 2010 researchers at the University of Toronto took an in-depth look at nine large municipal and highway reconstruction projects that developed an enhanced depiction of buried utilities. Based on this analysis, a cost model was proposed that takes into account both tangible and intangible benefits. All projects showed a positive return-on-investment (ROI) that ranged from $2.05 to $6.59 for every dollar spent on improving underground utility location data.

In Europe an economic analysis of a Milan pilot project to map all underground infrastructure using ground penetrating radar for the Expo Milan 2015 site was carried out. The study found a return on investment of €16 for every euro invested in improving the reliability information of underground infrastructure.

In the U.S. the Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) cites studies that have shown that the cost of detecting underground utilities prior to construction typically costs less than 0.5 percent of the total project construction cost, saves more than $4 for every $1 spent, and can reduce project delivery time by as much as 20 percent.

Growing private investment in infrastructure drives technology investment in construction

The need for investment in infrastructure has continued to grow. It has been estimated that some $57 trillion will be required over the next decade and a half, or an estimated $90 trillion if we want to ensure that this infrastructure is sustainable. Increasingly infrastructure projects require private investment because governments simply have less and less money for capital projects. To fill the shortfall requires private capital. Private capital in pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign investment funds amounts to over $50 trillion. Beginning in 2004 some of this money began to find its way into infrastructure investment and by 2007 private investment in infrastructure had reached $ 40 billion annually before the world financial crisis led to a cutback. Since then private investment in infrastructure has rebounded reaching nearly $80 billion in 2016.

Until recently construction has been at the bottom of the list with hunting and agriculture among industries with respect to investment in research and development.  There are signs that this is changing. In the last few years the number of startups focussed on technological innovation in construction has risen dramatically. Partly this can be ascribed to technological innovation that makes technologies such as reality capture, building information modeling (BIM), and augmented reality more accessible, but this is amplified by growing private investment in infrastructure. Private investment, unlike government investment which aims at social benefits, seeks financial returns. Whether the source of the funds is a pension fund, an insurance company, or a sovereign wealth fund, investments are expected to show a high likelihood of generating a significant financial return. This in turn drives productivity because increasing productivity of construction and operations and maintenance increases the return on investment.

Accelerating R&D into underground detection and modeling

There are indications of increased research and development initiatives related to underground infrastructure. In the U.S. for the first time the Common Ground Alliance (CGA), which represents the utility locate industry in North America, has just released a Technology Report, which describes the current state of underground detection technology including the latest developments and the gaps which CGA has identified in current hardware and software.

In the UK there have been quite a few research initiatives relating to underground infrastructure.  Project Iceberg, a collaborative project between Ordnance Survey (OS), British Geological Survey and Future Cities Catapult, has been created to better capture, collect and share data about underground assets and geological conditions and to find a way of sharing all this information among utility and energy companies, the transport sector, street works planners, building developers, and the construction industry.  The Mayor of London and the Smart London Infrastructure Network, which is composed of utilities responsible for water, energy, telecommunications and waste management in London, sponsored a challenge with the objective of developing digital technologies to accurately locate underground assets, including pipes, cables and joints, and determine their condition. The goal was to improve safety, and to reduce operational downtime, cost and environmental impact, and disruption. A national 10 year academic research program Mapping the Underworld focussed on remote-sensing for locating sub-surface utilities has just completed and been replaced by a follow-on 10 year program Assessing the Underworld. The BIM for the Subsurface (2015-2017) project, funded by Innovate UK, aimed to address issues such as project delays due to unforeseen ground conditions by applying the BIM process directly to ground investigation and subsurface infrastructure design.

Across Europe the SUB-URBAN COST Action (2013-17) aimed at developing relationships between experts who develop urban subsurface knowledge and urban decision makers, practitioners and the wider research community. The Action established a European network across 30 countries of Geological Surveys, Cities and Research Partners.

IDS GeoRadar Stream C

There is evidence of growing investment by major vendors in underground detection technology.  Hexagon, with revenue of $4 billion annually, acquired IDS (Ingegneria dei Sistemi) GeoRadar, an Italian company that has developed a towed multi-channel ground penetrating radar array that can collect data on underground infrastructure at faster speeds than has been possible heretofore. Since the acquisition Leica continues to release important enhancements to the software used to create 3D models of underground from the GPR scans and other information.  Furthermore a major software company, Bentley Geosystems with about $1 billion in annual revenue, has developed software specifically for managing location information about underground infrastructure. Bentley Subsurface Utility Engineering (SUE) enables users to develop 3D subsurface utility models from 2D models, resolve subsurface utility clashes, and model, analyze, and design subsurface infrastructure networks.

Recent advances in detecting and sharing location of underground utilities

Currently standard practice requires walking a lawn-mower like GPR array or hand-held EM wand along a road or right of way to detect underground utilities.  This is not only time-consuming and expensive, in traffic it is extremely dangerous.  Recently technical advances in detection were reported that bring rapid, cost-effective and safe collection of location information about underground infrastructure with no boots on the pavement closer to reality. T2 Utility Engineers, based in Whitby, Ontario have reported commercially using a multi-channel ground penetrating radar (GPR) array towed routinely at 10-12 km/hr to capture subsurface data.

Siteco rig with Sensors and Software GPR array and Faro LiDAR scanner

In a separate initiative a successful proof of concept by DGT Associates has been reported in Mississauga, Ontario in which data collected by a rig combining mobile laser scanning and GPR arrays collected data simultaneously above and below ground towed at roadway speeds of 80 to 90 km/hr.  In both cases the data was collected in soil conditions that were less than optimum for GPR. In both cases no boots were required on the pavement which addresses a serious safety issue with traditional GPR and electromagnetic (EM) detection.  However, in both cases significant time was required to post-process the collected scans, combine this information with as-builts, EM scans and other information to create 3D models. Much of the post-processing work remains manual. A rough estimate is that the post-processing requires two weeks per ten kilometers.  Nevertheless, that data can be collected safely at or near roadway speeds overcomes an important hurdle in developing 3D models of underground infrastructure.  In addition improvements in software are helping to speed up the post-processing required to create 3D models.

A significant cost for virtually every construction project is detecting underground utilities prior to and during construction.  This information is rarely shared so that the information about underground utilities collected during construction is effectively lost has to be collected over and over again. There are several initiatives underway to develop ways to share information about underground infrastructure that is captured during construction.

City of Chicago, Univ of Illinois Real-Time and Automated Monitoring and Control Lab (RAAMAC) and CityZenith

The City of Chicago has launched a pilot to deploy a platform for collecting data and creating and sharing a 3D map of underground. It is based on new technology developed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Real-Time and Automated Monitoring and Control Lab (RAAMAC) and Chicago start-up CityZenith. During excavation a dozen or more pictures are captured with an inexpensive digital camera. RAAMAC's software uses the photos to create a 3D digital model of the underground infrastructure. These models can be securely shared between the City of Chicago and construction contractors to improve project planning and limiting accidents. The advantage of this approach to data collection is that it does not interfere with construction and does not add any significant cost.  In a similar vein Bentley Systems has experimented with a system that equips excavation equipment with four inexpensive digital cameras that are used to collect images of underground infrastructure encountered during excavation. These images can be used to create an accurate georeferenced 3D map of the utilities encountered during excavation. A research project involving Costain and Bentley Systems has found that digital photography during excavation using a consumer grade smartphone can be used to create a 3D model of comparable accuracy to a laser scan survey and at much lower cost.

Recent advances in standards for locating underground utilities

Recently there have been developments that reflect improvements in underground remote sensing technology. Standards for reporting the reliability of the locational information about underground utilities have been in place for decades. In the U.S. the 2003 ASCE 38-02 which has been used for classifying location information about underground infrastructure according to its estimated reliability, is widely seen as being out of date. In France the 2012 presidential decree defines three explicit levels of cartographic accuracy for underground structures; A - less than 40 centimeters, B - 40 centimeters to 1.5 meters, and C - greater than 1.5 meters. In the UK the 2014 Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 128, developed under the auspices of the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and others, not only includes the A,B, C, D quality levels of the U.S. standard, but extends it with explicit precision levels B1 to B3. A process to revise PAS 128 to reflect newer technical developments has just been initiated.

Three organizations have sponsored a concept development study by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for underground information with the main outcome being an Engineering Report. The sponsors of the OGC Underground Concept Development Study were the Fund for the City of New York - Center for Geospatial Innovation, the Singapore Land Authority, and the Ordnance Survey (UK).  The Engineering Report documents the progress made by the OGC and its members to build a complete situation assessment and develop a conceptual framework for action to improve underground infrastructure data interoperability. The report also identifies the most important steps to be taken next in order to develop the necessary data standards.

This led to the development of draft versions of a Model for Underground Data Definition and Interchange ("MUDDI Data Model") and an RoI (return on investment) model Cost Benefit Assessment of Subterranean Information Management. MUDDI is being developed as an interchange and integration model to support a range of critical underground infrastructure and environment information that is currently held in a wide and disparate variety of forms. To review and assess MUDDI through actual implementations, the OGC has issued a call for participation for a MUDDI Workshop to be held July of this year in New York City.

Municipal and regional mapping of underground infrastructure

Some cities and regions have realized the value of knowing where their underground infrastructure is and have required better information about the location of underground utilities.  In most cases this involves legislation requiring and implementation of a system for sharing information about underground utilities between utility and telecom companies and construction contractors.

Many years ago Tokyo developed the mainframe-based Road Administration Information Center (ROADIC) system which was deployed first in Tokyo and then in most major cities in Japan. The ROADIC system provides information about the location of underground infrastructure including telecommunications and utilities.

Sarajevo, in Bosnia, has recorded the location of all utility and telecommunications infrastructure operating in the city on paper maps for over 50 years.  The building permitting process in Sarajevo required contractors working within the city to supply coordinates of all underground infrastructure to the permitting office where they were transcribed onto paper maps.  A decade ago Sarajevo converted these maps to digital format (Oracle Spatial).

Calgary, Alberta has had the JUMP (Joint Utility Mapping Project) for many years.  A city by-law requires that anyone placing cables or pipes undergound within city limits provide 2D maps in electronic form showing the location of the infrastructure.  The maps only show location and type of infrastructure (water, gas, electric power, telecom) and owner.  Anyone excavating in Calgary can access this database.  Edmonton, Alberta also has a shared facilities mapping database. The Instituto de Información Territorial del Estado de Jalisco developed an integrated infrastructure database for the State of Jalisco.

A project of the City of Sao Paulo called GeoCONVIAS which integrates data from 20 to 30 utilities operating in the city of Sao Paulo, which is one of the World's largest cities. The most important objectives  of the ConVIAS project are to organize underground infrastructure, prevent accidents during excavation, reduce inconvenience to the public, and reduce the costs of maintaining underground infrastucture. The utilities in Sao Paulo are not asked to provide detailed information about their underground facilities, just "a simple line" showing the location of their facilities.

Rio de Janeiro has a similar project GeoVias funded by the government of the City of Rio de Janeiro and four utilties.  One of the immediate motivations for this project was "man hole explosions" apparently resulting from the close proximity of underground electrical and gas facilities in Rio.  The objectives of the project in Rio are somewhat different from Sao Paulo, apparently because the network of underground facilities isn Rio is absolutely unique, certainly in Brazil, but maybe even in the world.  The objectives of the Rio project were to reduce the risk of accidents, eliminate hazardous interaction between different networks, for example, electric power and gas and provide information about the location of underground networks for construction projects. It was hoped that the project would also speed up the process of reviewing construction permit applications, which currently can take a year to complete, and emergency repairs to underground infrastructure.

Penang, Malaysia developed an interesting approach for mapping and maintaining a database of underground facilities.  Sutra D'Bank (Penang State Government Subterranean Data Bankis a database that is maintained by a joint venture company Equarater (Penang) Sdn Bhd (EPSB) .  Sutra D' Bank's customers are utilities or any other party undertaking excavations in areas under the jurisdiction of the local government.  The operator of Sutra D'Bank does two things.  They will provide the location of underground facilities in the planned excavation area, using the Sutra D'Bank database of undergound facilities supplemented by an on-site survey using a variety of technologies.  This is similar to the service that many utilities and telcos provide,  but identifies all underground facilities, not just those of one utility or telco.  In addition, the operator of Sutra D'Bank conducts an onsite as-built survey to record the 3D position and all relevant attributes of the new installation which they then upload to the Sutra D' Bank database.  This is unique and addresses a common problem - as-designed vs. as-constructed as-builts - that many utilities and telecoms face who rely on their construction contractors for as-builts.

The remarkable Sydney Down Under project brings together utility infrastructure including water, wastewater, telecommunications, electric power, and transportation infrastructure including rail and subways, and roads and highways, together with buildings (above and below ground) including interior spaces and occupants. It was developed by the Emergency Information Coordination Unit of the New South Wales government. This project involves 200 organizations including local and state governments, utilities and the telecommunications company.  The project is focussed on emergency and disaster management. Since the information is intended for emergency response applications, its availability is restricted.

A major step forward in mapping underground infrastructure was a pilot project carried out using ground penetrating radar (GPR) on the site of the Expo Milano 2015 event in Milan. The total project area is about 230 000 square meters. All underground infrastructure including electric power, water, sewers, gas, district heating, street lighting, and telecommunication, were mapped using ground penetrating radar (GPR) which was compared to historical records.  The comparison revealed major discrepancies in the historic record including thousands of meters of unknown infrastructure. For the known infrastructure large errors of geolocation were recorded.  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.

Initiatives towards national digital twins of infrastructure

Knowing where things are underground has become important enough that in several countries around the world; France, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the U.K. initiatives to improve our knowledge about the location of underground infrastructure are already underway.

In France a nation-wide multi-billion euro project was initiated to improve the quality of the location information about France's underground utility infrastructure. A 2013 presidential decree mandates that by 2019 the location of critical underground infrastructure in urban areas will be mapped to 40 cm or better. (According to the decree critical infrastructure does not include telecommunications or water and sewers.) Furthermore by 2026 the location of all of the nation's infrastructure will be mapped to 40 cm. The decree also specifies the liability for hitting underground infrastructure that shares the responsibility between the utility owner and the the contractor depending on the precision of the information available about the underground facility.

Underground Netherlands

But more importantly, as a potential model for the cost-efficient sharing of information about the underground, the Netherlands has embarked on a national program supported by legislation and standards to expand the collection and sharing of data about the subsurface. In 2015 a new law was passed by the States General in the Netherlands which created the Basisregistratie Ondergrond (BRO) or Key Registry for the Subsurface which is open and accessible to all citizens of the Netherlands. The law mandates that if you excavate or drill you have to share your data with the BRO registry. In addition if when using the data in the registry you find something is incorrect you have to report it.  The Key Registry for the Subsurface (BRO) came into force in January, 2018. The BRO registry consists of 26 data types, which will become mandatory in installments over five years and all of which include location. On 1 January 2018,it become mandatory to report the first three data types, geotechnical surveys (CPT), groundwater monitoring wells and soil drilling sample profiles. On 26 June 2018, this data became publicly available via the Dutch open data portal PDOK.  Work is underway to implement data models for the remaining data types including cables and pipes for which the Dutch standard IMKL will be used.  All 26 will become mandatory by 2022. The information model cables and pipes (IMKL) is a Dutch standard data model for the exchange of data about underground infrastructure and is founded on the INSPIRE model for cables and pipes, in which location is specified in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) GML format.

As a result of the conjunction of the release of three UK government reports, Industrial Strategy Building A Britiain for the Future, Transforming Infrastructure Performance, and Data for the Public Good, the transformation in how infrastructure is built, managed and operated in the UK has made a national digital twin a key concept for the UK government. A national digital twin includes above and below ground assets. It is based on the foundation concept that a digital model is equally important as the physical assets.  Combining above and below-ground information into one national single data model/data exchange framework will allow industry to share business developments and innovation activities.  Project Iceberg is an exploratory project undertaken by the British Geological Survey, Ordnance Survey and the Future Cities Catapult to investigate ways to integrate data and services relating to the underground with other city data. To date two reports Market Research into the Current State of Play and Global Case Studies and Defining the problem space for an integrated data operating system above and below ground have been published and are publicly available.The medium term objective is to take these concepts forward with project partners to develop new digital data demonstrator projects.

Underground Singapore: Straits Times

In Singapore the Urban Redevelopment Authority is planning to have a masterplan of Singapore's underground spaces ready by 2019. It will be released as part of the next Master Plan guiding Singapore's development in the medium term.

In the U.S. an initiative has just been started to create a national infrastructure map which would include subsurface infrastructure. In June of this year a special summit was convened at Arizona State University which included leaders in public administration, infrastructure development, geography, GIS, and data integration/open data. The objective of the meeting was to review the current state of location-based information on national infrastructure including underground, examine efforts to integrate location based data systems across jurisdictions, understand the perspective of stakeholder communities, identify strategies for more systematic access to data at the national scale, and discuss the role of government to implement such strategies.

Summary

Mapping the underground is an essential component of creating a national digital twin. Recent technical development including the ability to collect data at highway speeds that can be used to create a 3D model of underground infrastructure, software that can extract relevant 3D underground information from consumer digital photography and video capture, novel ways to share information about underground infrastructure during construction at no significant additional cost to contractors, and progress on standards for sharing information about the subsurface are bringing us close to being able to cost-effectively create a digital twin of underground infrastructure at the municipal, regional and national levels increasingly feasible.

A key motivation for 3D mapping the subsurface is the risk to construction projects of unknown or poorly mapped underground infrastructure. Every year workers and the members of the public are injured or killed as a result of unforeseen underground utility hits. Underground utilities are the number one cause of delays in highway construction projects. The economic cost to the U.S. economy of not knowing where underground utilities is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. A number of studies have concluded that the ROI of improving the accuracy of location of underground infrastructure is significant, with estimates of the benefits ranging as high as $21 for every dollar invested.

Singapore, the Netherlands and France have adopted policies leading to the development of accurate digital models of their national underground infrastructure.  Putting this in the context of smart cities, where data in the form of a national digital twin becomes just as important as physical assets, it is essential that a national digital twin include above and below ground assets. Fundamental to this process is rethinking value, not just the value of a finished building or infrastructure asset, but over the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset.  The development of a national digital twin has recently been enunciated by the UK government. In the United States an initiative has just been kicked off in March 2018 to develop a national infrastructure map including underground infrastructure.  Taken together - the public awareness of the problem, the technical advancements in underground detection in the last few years that are making cost-efficient 3D mapping of the underground increasingly feasible, and the growing recognition of the the benefits of accurate 3D maps of underground infrastructure – have led to accelerated momentum to create a digital twin of the subsurface at the municipal, regional and national levels.

British guidelines for BIM targeting 33% savings in TOTEX to become international ISO standards

The BS 1192 suite of guidelines and best practices developed under the auspices of the BSI, the national standards body of the UK, are designed to help the UK construction industry adopt BIM Level 2 and applies to both building and infrastructure assets. These standards target 33% savings over the full life-cycle of a building or infrastructure asset. BSI has announced that beginning this year the BS 1192 British standards will become international ISO standards.

An introduction to BIM Level 2 for folks for whom BIM is new can be found here.

BS 1192 (2007 + 2016)

The principles for information sharing and modelling of BIM Level 2 are outlined in this standard. BS 1192 provides a ‘best-practice’ method for the development, organization and management of production information for the construction industry and provides the template for common naming conventions and approaches to collaborative working for use in architecture, engineering and construction. It is also designed to assist efficient data use in facilities management.

Will be replaced in 2018 by;
"BS EN ISO 19650–1 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 1: Concepts and principles."

PAS 1192-2 (2013)

PAS 1192-2 focuses on project delivery, specifically, the graphical data, non-graphical data and documents that are accumulated from design and construction activities.

Will be replaced in 2018 by;
"BS EN ISO 19650-2 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 2: Delivery phase of assets."

PAS 1192-3 (2014)

PAS 1192-3 addresses the recognition that the cost of operating and maintaining buildings and facilities can represent up to 85% of the whole-life cost of a facility. PAS 1192-3 provides guidance to asset managers on how to integrate asset management during operations and maintenance with the accumulation of information about assets during design and construction. The UK government has targeted cost savings of 33% across the entire life-cycle of a facility by implementing the processes outlined in PAS 1192-2 and PAS 1192-3.

Will be replaced in 2020 by;
"BS EN ISO 19650-3 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 3: Operational phase of assets."

PAS 1192-5 (2015)

PAS 1192-5 outlines the cyber-security vulnerabilities to hostile attack when using BIM and provides an assessment process to determine the levels of cyber-security for BIM collaboration which should be applied during all phases of the life-cycle.

Will be replaced in 2020 by;
"BS EN ISO 19650-5 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 5: Specification for security-minded building information modelling, digital built environments and smart asset management."

The announcement by the BSI did not include two other parts of the suite;

• BS 1192 4 (2014) outlines the UK usage of COBie, an internationally agreed information exchange schema for exchanging facility information between the employer and the supply chain.
• BS 8536-1 (2015) aims to involve the operator of the facility from the outset by documenting building performance requirements early in the design phase to ensure that designers design for optimum performance of a facility.

First quantitative ROI analysis of the benefits of BIM for FM

Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years and in many countries an increasing number of which are mandating BIM for public projects. There is hard data supporting the benefits of BIM for design and construction.  While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", there has not been hard data to support this. At SPAR3D 2018 in Anaheim George Broadbent of Microdesk reported the first results of a quantitative ROI analysis of the application of BIM from construction through operations for several large projects.

The question that George asked at the beginning of this project was "Does BIM really benefit facility operations ?' There has been a lot of interest in the benefits of BIM for facilities and asset management from people in the facilities management (FM) sector and from owners, but concrete ROI data has been lacking.

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

Most of the spatial and non-spatial data collected during construction is useful during operations. 100 % of floor plans and most of the 3D model (geometry and associated data) are needed in operations.  Some owners find that just the BIM model is adequate for managing the facility.  Others augmented the BIM model by a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) which adds financial, occupancy, maintenance history and other information.

For this proof of concept study the implementation of BIM for FM involved a web-based tool providing mobile and desktop access to the BIM 3D geometry and tabular data of the as-built model and Maximo for managing work orders.

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

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

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

P3 drives integrated geospatial + BIM in the Canadian construction industry

Several years ago Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch highway authority, initiated Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) highway projects. Private Dutch engineering and construction companies bidding on these projects found that adopting an integrated geospatial + BIM approach on DBFM projects yielded significant benefits. I blogged previously about the firm Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult that adopted an integrated BIM + geospatial full-lifecycle approach to construction because many of its projects were DBFM projects. In Canada public–private partnership (P3) have been remarkably successful for building and maintaining infrastructure. At the CanBIM 2018 Regional Session in Vancouver I had a chance to chat with Thomas Strong, Managing Director VDC at EllisDon, who said that at EllisDon integrated BIM + geospatial was considered best practices on full-lifecyle projects including P3 projects in Canada.

Background

McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption and two of the technologies that it believes will be key in that anticipated transformation are geospatial and BIM. Large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile. McKinsey has identified five technologies that it believes will be transformative in the construction industry. Two are geospatial technologies and BIM.  Integrated BIM + geospatial is essential to enable the full capabilities of both technologies.

Geospatial + BIM at EllisDon

Thomas Strong has an interesting background that prepared him for the 3D digital construction world. He started his career in plastic injection molding making steel molds to fabricate plastic parts for cars. In this world engineers use 3D models to fully define to the fabricators what they are going to fabricate. In 2002 he transitioned to the construction industry and found that design business processes were quite different - in the construction industry things don’t get fully defined until they are built. When he joined EllisDon, he got involved with a couple of Frank Gehry projects including the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) where contractors worked from 3D models that were provided by the architect right from the beginning. After that experience, EllisDon started to implement the use of 3D models for design, quantities, and logistics to produce schedules. Now when EllisDon tender work, they use 3D models to define the geometry and the scope of work.

Thomas has been tracking trends in the geospatial + BIM world since joining EllisDon. The use of Laser Scanning is an important new technology driving significant business at EllisDon, who did their first 3D scans in 2003 on the AGO project. EllisDon now routinely conducts scans for deviation analysis, progress tracking and to capture existing conditions related to their core business construction work as well as offering scan-to-BIM as a service. They have developed a leading edge capability for converting LiDAR scans to 3D BIM geometry very quickly and accurately. They use this capability to reverse engineer existing buildings for renovation or heritage projects. The EllisDon VDC group, which was established in 2008 and which Thomas leads, provides consulting services around 3D scanning and developing as-built models.

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

Integrated geospatial+BIM is critical during the operations and maintenance phase of a building. Utilities, transportation, emergency planning, first responder access, energy performance, and evacuation management all require information about internal and external infrastructure. A common geospatial coordinate system enables a comprehensive operational view of all infrastructure including internal and external structures. Thomas explained to me that at EllisDon best practices on full lifecycle projects is to use real world coordinates. He has found that it is sometimes necessary to put a little pressure on architects and others to do because there is predilection among some architects for (0,0) coordinate systems.

It was P3 projects that got EllisDon into full lifecycle projects and led to them developing their own in-house facilities management (FM) group.  As EllisDon's P3 business has grown, their FM has also continued to grow.  Since they are in-house, the FM folks are at the table right from the beginning of a project. EllisDon recognizes the value of the data that is collected over a project lifecyle, and the entire team is aware it's important to deliver the data for the asset in a way that can plug and play in an organized way into the asset management/facilities management platform.

Large public project in U.S. mandates BIM for full-life-cycle construction

One of the largest municipal bond-financed construction projects in the United States has mandated building information modeling (BIM), targetting not only design and construction, but as a permanent record of college assets for use during operations and maintenance.  The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) is the largest community college district in the United States and serves more than 250,000 students annually at nine colleges, spread throughout the greater Los Angeles area. More than 70% of LACCD students are underserved minorities and over 40% of students are over the age of 25.

LACCD has received funding through taxpayer-approved bonds and the State of California to launch its BuildLACCD sustainable building project. BuildLACCD is a $9.5 billion building program is funded mainly by bonds approved by Los Angeles voters in 2001-2016.  The objectives of the project is modernizing and improving campus facilities to enhance opportunities for students from lower-income communities and involved designing and constructing more than 65 new buildings, as well as remodeling many others.  The LACCD consuders itself a leader in environmentally responsible construction. The BuildLACCD Sustainable Building Program is enabling LACCD to not only modernize its colleges but to build more than 40 new structures that will meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards.  LACCD is generating solar power on its campuses and taking other steps to reduce the colleges' carbon footprint. The final phase of the project has mandated a building information modeling (BIM) approach, requiring that each building be modeled in 3D and managed using BIM processes.

I have blogged about the innovative BIM program at LACCD.   About twelve years ago it was decided to capture 3D BIM models of all the buildings on the LACCD  campuses. One of the most important motivations for creating these models was that BIM models would facilitate energy performance analyses of LACCD buildings - which supports the current building program, which targets zero energy usage.  The models include interior power, water, mechanical, and lighting systems together with 2D models of underground infrastructure on the nine LACCD campuses.

There are interesting and unique aspects of how these models were captured.  Perhaps most importantly, the models were created entirely by LACCD students.  Existing structures were laser scanned and BIM models were developed from the point clouds by students. In addition to creating the models themselves this has created a large BIM skilled labour pool in Los Angeles.

The second important aspect of capturing BIM models of college buildings is that to ensure a uniform representation of all the buildings across all of the campuses and interoperability with various applications,  standards should be used wherever possible.  The initial standards adopted include Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), Spatial Data Standards for Facilities, Infrastructure, and (SDSFIE), OMNIClass, and COBIE.  The BIM models were stored in a spatially-enabled relational database using real world coordinates.  Real world coordinates and spatial SQL enabled the models to be easily integrated with geospatial data from a variety of sources. The models could then be used for a variety of purposes including visualization, energy performance modeling, predictive maintenance,  and safety and security simulations.

The final phase of the BuildLACCD project involves more than 500 participants representing nearly a thousand different trades. The plan targets capturing data associated with assets in the planning and design phase so this information can later be utilized by facility directors and campus project directors for maintenance and operations. For the widespread community college with nine campuses this requires a common geospatial coordinate system so that all facilities can be viewed on a map and users can see each building spatially in reference to other facilities including utilities and roads and vegetation. The LACCD database buildings currently houses more than 3 million files totaling five terabytes of data.  The data is stored in Bentley Projectwise which provides a common interface and foundation for a standardized, collaborative BIM approach. ProjectWise is the central repository for all information, including models, drawings, specifications, photographs, and all other project data.

Open source-based mobile viewer creates value for electric power utilities with multiple GISs

One of the challenges faced by large utilities with multiple GIS, outage management, customer information and other systems, which are often the result of mergers, is how to make spatial and associated data, in different, often incompatible systems, accessible to all users not just GIS professionals.  At Distributech 2018 Duke Energy described an off-the-shelf web-based product based on open source components that is being used by 8000 users, 2000 of them using it 24/7 every day, to access GIS and associated data in several GIS systems, both online and offline, using laptops, tablets and phones.  An important advantage of the the selection process Duke used in selecting the product was that it made it possible for a relative newcomer to compete successfully with the traditional GIS incumbents.

Background

Large investor-owned utilities are often the result of mergers. For example, in 2012 Duke Energy and Progress Energy merged to create the largest U.S. utility with 7.4 million U.S. customers and approximately 52,700 megawatts of electric generating capacity. The challenge for the IT folks is how to manage the many disparate IT systems that such mergers bring together. Historically Duke Energy and Progress Energy have employed all the major GIS systems including Synercom, Intergraph FRAMME, GE Smallworld, ESRI, Intergraph GTechnology, and IBM GFIS. Accessing the valuable operational data in multiple systems is a challenge because each system has its own user interface and command structure. Over the years I have seen a number of solutions that have attempted to address the challenge of providing a common viewer for visualizing data from multiple data sources. But each has had limitations, for example, all data had to be synced to a central Oracle database, or it could only run online making it difficult to deploy to the field, or it had limited support for the many GISs and user files used by utilities, or it supported iOS on handheld devices but not Android, or did not support open standards such as OGC WMS and WFS, or did not support Google Maps, or was so complex users required extensive training and it was like pulling teeth to geth them to use iit.

At Distributech 2018 Ron York, Lead Consultant/ GIS, and Francisco Sarmento, Lead Consultant, both at Duke Energy described how Duke has resolved the problem of a common viewer for several different GIS systems which was brought to a head by the merger of Duke and Progress. They also described the somewhat unusual process by which Duke selected the vendor whose product provided the successful solution.

Open source geospatial components

A key differentiator of the product Duke chose is that it is leverages open source components; PostGIS, GeoServer and Leaflet being the main ones. The product builds on the collective wisdom, code and support provided by the worldwide open source geospatial community.  Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. PostGIS adds spatial capabilities to the PostgreSQL relational database. It extends PostgreSQL so it can store, query, and manipulate spatial data. GeoServer is a web server that allows maps and data in a variety of formats to be served to standard clients such as web browsers and desktop GIS programs. Data is published via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard interfaces, such as WMS and WFS.  These are all Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) projects.

Multiple GIS support

The product Duke selected supports ESRI ArcGIS, GE Smallworld, Intergraph GTechnology, spatialNET and Google Maps. At Duke it is used to access data in a couple of GISs as well as non-GIS data in Maximo, SAP, three different outage management systems, four or five customer information systems, and can link to CAD drawings and photos and images.  Importantly for engineering users it preserves the original symbology and background maps of the different GIS systems.

Online and offline

Another key advantage of Duke's solution is that it can run equally well offline and online and is able to seamlessly combine and switch between online and offline data.

Mobile and office devices

It supports mobile as well as office devices, running on laptops, tablets and phones running iOS, Android, and Windows. The user interface adapts automatically for each device, displaying map layers, forms and other data in a way that is appropriate for each device.

Synced or direct access to databases

It provides two ways of accessing data; one is to periodically import or sync data into the system's spatial database, which uses PostGIS, and the other is to directly access the data via a web service. It supports ESRI REST Services, which are used by ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise, and the industry standard OGC WMS and WFS web services, which are supported by all major geospatial vendors.

It does not support direct edit of spatial data, but does allow a GIS data correction requests to be routed through Maximo following Duke standard business procedure for making corrections.

It is flexible enough to support different business processes for collecting and organizing data. For example, pole inspections are conducted by circuit in what was Progress service territories and by square area in what was Duke's service territory.

Simplicity of use

Another of the key differentiators of Duke's web-based solution is that it is not targeted on GIS professionals, but on the 95% of people within Duke who can get a lot of value from a really simple Google Maps style interface onto their enterprise data.

Leading up to and during deployment Duke put on road shows, made web demos available online, utilized computer-based-training, and provided job-aid documents to make people aware of the new system.  The tool caught on surprisingly rapidly. Within five months of it being deployed there were 5000 users. Currently there are 8000 users with over 2000 users accessing it 24/7 every day.

Anticipated and unanticipated benefits

The major expected benefit that was realized by the system is that eases the integration of Duke and Progess. All GIS asset data is exposed through a single tool to designers and asset engineers. But there were some unanticipated benefits as well.  It has had a direct impact on tax calculation - it shortened the cycle for internal auditors to complete tax assessments.  It is also widely used during storms and other natural disasters. It enables crews from different area to use a familiar tool to analyze unfamiliar data in areas where they haven't been before.  It is used to provide driving directions for field crews.  Storm managers overlay outages, assets, flood plains, wind, rain, traffic  and other maps for situational assessment.  It allows manager to share staging sites during storms. It has also  proved extremely useful in locating "unmatched outages" - outages called in by first responders with just an address.

Process for choosing a vendor levels playing field for new entrants

Duke used an interesting process to select the vendor. Preliminary vendor interviews were conducted to exclude vendors that clearly didn't have a solution that could meet Duke's needs. Remote web demos provided a cheap and easy way to narrow down the list of vendors. A request for proposal (RFP) process was used to solicit technical-only proposals from product vendors. (Duke was only interested in off-the-shelf products not bespoke solutions.)  Duke picked the top five and asked them to come to Duke for a scripted demonstration. Instead of asking the vendors for a benchmark demonstrating how their product would address Duke's requirements using Duke data, they asked the vendors to demonstrate their product using their own data. They picked the top two vendors and began contract negotiations to decide on one vendor which turned out to be Ubisense MyWorld, a relatively new entrant in the geospatial world.  An important advantage of the selection process Duke used is that it made it possible for a relative newcomer to compete successfully with traditional GIS incumbents.

Open source geospatial application reduces copper cable theft by 70%

A highlight of the SA Geotech conference in Johannesburg was a presentation by Ryno Goosen of Suritec Geospatial.  Ryno, who was awarded the Best Paper prize at SA Geotec, gave a fascinating presentation about how he developed an open source GIS solution to fight copper cable theft.

In Canada copper cable theft costs the Canadian electricity sector an estimated $40 million annually.  In South Africa in 2014 there were 72,533 reported incidents of copper cable theft resulting in 10,736 arrests.  Copper theft incidents in the U.S. have tripled in the last 5 years.

Goosen Goosen's solution architecture was based on open source geospatial software.  He chose open source for several reasons.  First and foremost, it enabled massive scalability by providing an elastic IT infrastructure.  Secondly it provided open interoperability with other open source software as well as proprietary systems. He also emphasized the importance of using software that was "battle-tested" in both military and commercial environments. 

His solution architecture was built on Cesium, GeoServer, Boundless Desktop/QGIS, Protobuf, Cassandra, WildFly, Solr and GeoTrellis.  Using this solution he was able to combine data from different sources including ground patrol and remote sensors.  By analyzing this data geographically and temporally he was able to determine spatial and temporal patterns of copper cable theft.  This enabled optimum deployment of resources.  The results were impressive.  Over a 30-month period cable theft was reduced by 69%.

The success of Goosen's shows that open source GIS software has become a viable alternative for building complex and highly scalable solution-oriented architectures.  He also suggested that it levels the playing field for small to medium size enterprises by providing them with similar intelligence capabilities to their larger counterparts.

Monitoring integrity of water networks with satellites

I am at HxGNLive in Las Vegas this week.  One of the several very interesting presentations with important implications for a number of industries is a talk by Massimo Zotti of Planetek.  He described an application called Network Alert that uses satellite observations to monitor ground displacements including subsidence with millimeter precision.  An application of this technology is water utilities who use it to look for subsidence and other ground displacements which are symptoms of water leaks.

Network Alert uses Sentinal-1 satellites whose frequent revisits over the same area allow changes in land cover to be closely monitored.  Sentinel-1’s C-band synthetic aperture radar provides ‘radar interferometry’ by combining two or more radar images over the same area to detect changes occurring between acquisitions. Interferometry allows for the monitoring of even slight ground movement – down to a few millimetres – across wide areas.

Network Alert uses radar interferometry to provide accurate, current information about ground instability and displacements in a water pipeline network that indicate leaking pipes. It alerts the utility to prioritize inspection and maintenance activities.  Monthly updates provide accurate information based on continuous satellite monitoring of ground movement and displacement.  For example, over one and a half years a 3 cm subsidence was evidence of a substantial leak.

Utility industry vendors urged to adopt data model standard

Software comes and goes, but a utility's data model persists. A shared electric power data model enables electric power utilities to move away from incompatible point solutions toward tightly integrated solutions which are essential for real-time monitoring, situational assessment and decision making.  Based on today's smart devices and sensors and utility-wide communications network, decision making in a real-time, big data world requires tight integration between applications.  To realize the full potential of the smart grid, utility industry vendors need to move rapidly to adopt data model standards, that's the recommendation of Geoff Cameron of AGSI. which has developed a platform based on a utility data model standard that provides real-time access to critical infrastructure, customer and operational information. 

 

Traditional electric utilities are typically departmentalized and rely on manual, paper-based processes. Sharing knowledge is relatively slow, cumbersome, and reactive in nature and characterized by redundant data, many incompatible point solutions and non-real-time.  Facilities are inspected periodically, data is accumulated and analyzed, a report is written and sometime in the future do something is done.  Today's intelligent electronic devices, bidirectional communications networks, and automation provide the basis for dramatically improving a utility's SAIDI and SAIFI outage statistics.  It also provides a foundation for transactive energy.  What is required to realize the full potential of the smart grid is a platform that enables real-time integrated applications.

 

At Distributech 2017 Dan Guatto, COO and VP of Engineering and Operations, described how Burlington Hydro (BHI), a distribution utility with 65,500 customers, has evolved from a point solution environment to an integrated, secure, and real-time utility.  As is typical of many distribution utilities, BHI was facing increased technology sophistication, the need integrated business workflows (operations, engineering, customer engagement, financial) to improve efficiency.  BHI had to address siloed legacy systems and business processes.  Many industry solution offerings fixed individual problems but were expensive and did not take into account integration and long term data management.  Many “enterprise” offerings in the marketplace were proprietary black box solutions with little flexibility that made BHI feel that it was surrendering control of its data and processes.  One of the major problems BHI identified was the lack of O.T. / I.T. convergence for true enterprise efficiency.   Solutions required quite expensive capital outlay and deployment.  Projects became too big and and bogged down and were unable to address fast paced industry change.  In Ontario some of the larger utilities made significant technology investments, but at the end of the day these projects were extremely expensive, disjointed and largely underutilized (or even abandoned). BHI was also concerned about the infancy of smart grid technology and rapid future changes and didn't want to be tied to an inflexible system as the speed of industry changes accelerated.  BHI was convinced that a sound system architecture had to be based on electric industry standards and was aware that AGSI had been working with EPRI on a real-time platform based on Common Information Model (CIM) and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.

 

Over the past decade open electric power data model standards have been developed for transmission, distribution, smart substations and other electric power functions.  Worldwide the Common Information Model (CIM) has become the standard for transmission.  CIM is also widely used outside of North America for distribution.  In North America the Multispeak standard is the most widely used distribution data model standard, although CIM is used by larger utilities.  These data models are mature and cover virtually all aspects of electric power utility operations.

CIM was originally developed for standardizing electric utility information exchange.  It was designed by electrical engineers, adopted by the IEC and supported by EPRI and multiple electric utility partners, vendors and organizations.  The IEC, EPRI and partners continue to extend the model to cover asset health, station design, work, smart grid integration, IoT Integration, and network operating protocols.  CIM is able to support all aspects of electrical operations (OMS/DMS), electric analysis / smart grid, distributed energy (DER), work orders, crew management, and assets.  AGSI has implemented the CIM Core, Topology, Wires, & Assets object models in a relational database (Oracle Spatial).  Its implementation represents a real-time network model of the CIM electric system data model and provides a centralized view and interaction with the network in real-time.

 

Today this technology connects and integrates engineering, SCADA, AMI, GIS, load analysis, other smart grid deployments such as EV charging, customer, and asset databases into a single accessible platform and enabled BHI to evolve from a point solution environment to an integrated, secure, and real-time utility.  Real-time data unification provides a basis for transparent workflows and a centralized reliable source of truth enables advanced analytics for optimized investment planning.  An open architecture based on industry standards provides the flexibility to adapt to rapid changes in technology as the smart grid evolves. Real-time information sharing enables faster decision making and increased customer satisfaction via real-time situational awareness about outages and planned work.  Don Guatto believes that it provides the foundation for transactive energy which is looming on every utility's horizon.