Between the Poles

Firm realizes ROI of 203% by integrating CAD and GIS for fiber network management

Integrating CAD and GIS into an efficient workflow for records management (aka network documentation) has been a challenge for utility and telecom operators for decades.  While utility and telecom operators have found ways to address this problem, it is rare to find the benefits for these systems quantified.  At Year in Infrastructure this year iForte Solusi Infotek presented concrete benefits of a records management system that has been in operation for several years for managing their fiber optic networks in Jakarta and on the rest of Java.

I began working in the utility and telecom sector in 1993, specifically in developing software for records management (called network documentation outside of North America).  At that time the magnitude of the AEC+geospatial cultural mismatch problem was just beginning to be appreciated by utilities and telecoms.  Planners tend to use GIS tools, engineers and designers CAD tools, construction folks in the field paper CAD drawings, and asset managers GIS integrated with their FM tools. Fashioning engineering and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represented a challenge that remains a problem for utilities and telecom companies. The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from the very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data and applications in an efficient workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

The winner of this year's Year in Infrastructure Award for Communications Networks was a project of iForte Solusi Infotek.   iForte is a fast-growing fiber network operator with many large corporate customers all over Java island including Jakarta.  From this base it plans to expand into the rest of Indonesia.  iForte was facing many of the problems associated with paper-based records management in a fast-growing network operator. Prior to implementing the new system, their business processes were characterized by a plethora of paper-based manual processes. The data available for network planning was continually out of date making it difficult to compile an accurate situational assessment. Maintenance crews in the field had to rely on their own hand written notes on paper records. When sales staff met with a prospective customer it took an hour or more to collect the required information to determine the availability of fiber optic capacity at the customer's location requiring subsequent exchanges of emails to get the requisite information to the customer by which time the customer may have contacted a competitor.

The primary benefits of the new system were realized in planning, network maintenance and sales. 

• Maintenance crews could redline existing as-builts in the field so that engineering could see immediately where a problem had occurred and any temporary infrastructure the maintenance team had put in place to address the problem.
• Planning could see real-time cable utilization to identify congested networks. When there was an outage they could see the total capacity that was at risk.  It also enabled them to find alternatives for re-routing the network.  It was also found that network expansion planning could be completed four times faster. They were also able to use less fiber, saving on material costs and CAPEX. For example in one case, by looking at available capacity and utilization, it was possible to reduce new cable requirements from 1,400 meter to 100.
• For sales prior to implementing the records management system, determining fibre availability for a customer required on average of 60 minutes necessitating telephone calls to records. After implementing the new system, they were able to determine availability in six minutes and automatically generate a bill of materials and a job estimate.

For these activities iForte estimated that it has realized a return on investment of 203% over three years.

The primary benefits of the new system were realized in planning, network maintenance and sales, but there were intangible benefits as well.  Management was able to see the status of the network in real-time, review progress in building out the network on a map with demographics, assess the status of their network assets, and identify regions for network expansion.  The intangible value to the company achieved with the new system was operational excellence and improved strategic planning which provided for better performance and growth compared to competitors.

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

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

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

ESRI and Autodesk partnership

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

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

Integrating BIM and CAD with GIS

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

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

Integrating GIS with civil workflows

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

Integrating civil and geospatial workflows with BIM

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

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

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

OGC workshop focusses on challeges to achieving interoperability for location of underground infrastructure

In July the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) held an underground Infrastructure ETL (export-transform-load) - Plugfest at the Fund for New York City (FCNY).  The central theme was development of a Model for Underground Data Definition and Integration (MUDDI) on which to base interoperability between different data sources and applications about the location of underground utilities and other subsurface structures.

The MUDDI ETL-Plugfest Workshop was held at the Fund for the City of New York (FCNY) on July 24-25. During the workshop there were many ver interesting presentations from the international community interested in detecting underground infrastructure and finding way to make it easier to share the information.

Josh Lieberman of the OGC described the primary motivations for developing standards to make sharing underground infrastructure (UGI) easier. There are numerous examples of disasters that have occurred because we don't know where UGI is. Lack of accurate knowledge about the subsurface is responsible for inefficiencies in construction that are a significant drag on the economy. Currently UGI data quality is poor, to a great part because we cannot the share the information that is captured during every construction project, environmental assessment or disaster planning and management exercise.

Josh piointed out that one of the biggest challenges is that there are a variety of proprietary and open data models for UGI and underground geology, each with its own special industry focus, are in use making interoperability a challenge. A partial list for UGI includes

• CityGML Utility Network ADE (Application Domain Extension)
• INSPIRE Utility Networks
• IMKL (Information model for cable and pipes)
• Land and Infrastructure Conceptual Model (LandInfra)
• Underground Pipeline Information Management System
• Power utilities transmission and distribution - CIM, Multispeak + several proprietary models from different vendors
• Gas Technology Institute (GTI) - Gas Distribution Model (GDM)
• Water and wastewater - several proprietary models

Similarly for subsurface soil, water and geology there are a number of standards in use with different applications.

• BGS National Geological Model
• BRGM SCUDD
• GeoSciML
• EarthResourceML
• INSPIRE
• GeoTOP
• GroundwaterML
• SoilIEML

Each of these models are designed for different purposes including engineering, facilities management, electric power grid performance modeling, water management, hazard assessment, and environmental assessment.  Applications have been developed around each of these models serving the different communities for which they were developed.  Josh then described how MUDDI attempts to provide a general 3D model for interoperability between these different specialized models and the types of questions such a general model would be able to answer.

Call for participation to develop model for sharing location of underground infrastructure

Public safety is at risk whenever underground excavation occurs. For example, when a gas line penetrates sewer lines during trenchless horizontal drilling, there is a risk of explosion when a sewer line subsequently backs up and an attempt is made to clear the obstruction with an augur. During construction workers accidentally rupture a high pressure gas line leading to an explosion.  It requires hours to identify the source of an explosion in a residential neighbourhood which caused fatalities.  A project to extend a light rail transit system encounters many unknown underground utilities during construction which delay the project by one and half years. The number one cause of highway construction delays in the U.S. 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%.

All of these things can be prevented if an accurate 3D digital twin of the underground were available. To address these challenges three organizations sponsored a concept development study by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for underground information with a main outcome being an Engineering Report. The sponsors of the OGC Underground Concept Development Study were:

• Fund for the City of New York - Center for Geospatial Innovation

• Singapore Land Authority

• 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 ETL-Plugfest Workshop to be held July 24-25 at the New York City Offices of the Fund for the City of New York (FCNY). An ETL-Plugfest focuses on extract, transform, and load practices and tools for the translation of data between differing formats, schemas, and environments.

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.

Avoiding a repeat of the CAD/GIS quaqmire of the past quarter century

Yesterday at Distributech 2018 in San Antonio I listened to a talk from a consulting company contracted by an electric power utility to clean up GIS data originally sourced from CAD drawings.  This reminded me once again that is a challenge that telecommunications and cable companies and electric and water utilities have been attempting to deal with at least since the early 1990s and for some even before that.  Telecommunications and cable and leading electric power utilities resolved this problem at least a decade ago, but for some electric power and even more water utilities it remains a problem that is going to hold these utilities back when they should be accelerating their adoption of digital technologies.

I began working in the utility and telecom sector in 1993, specifically in developing software for records management (called network documentation outside of North America), and at that time the magnitude of the AEC+geospatial cultural mismatch problem was just beginning to be appreciated by utilities and telecoms. In utilities and telecoms planners tend to use GIS tools, engineers and designers CAD tools, construction folks in the field paper CAD drawings, and asset managers GIS integrated with their FM tools. Fashioning AEC and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represented a challenge that remains a problem for utilities. The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from the very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data in a common workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

A workflow that is found at every utility and telecom involves the design-build-maintain information flow. The workflow begins with an engineer and drafter producing a design, typically a CAD drawing, which is printed for the construction contractor to use in building a facility. The contractor uses the drawing in the field and then returns it as an "as-built" to the utility's records management group, who enter it, traditionally by manually redigitizing it from the paper drawing, into a GIS that is intended to contain the digital twin of the network. The data in the GIS is used for network maintenance, outage management and other functions. The reason for the manual redigitization step is the "errors" that CAD drawings inevitably contain unless drafters are forced to adhere to "geospatial rules". This entire process is slow and error-prone and backlogs of as-builts waiting to be entered into the GIS stretch into months and even years. The result is that utility GIS data is more often than not incomplete, out-of-date, and unreliable. For example, at the beginning of the broadband revolution, telecoms needed to be able to tell customers whether they were close enough to a terminal and fiber to be eligible for ADSL. In one of the largest telecoms in the U.S. the GIS records were so incomplete and unreliable that survey teams had to be sent out at considerable cost to resurvey the location of their terminals and fiber cables.

Because there was no standards-based solution to the CAD+GIS problem, every utility and telecom has had to try to find its own solution to the problem. This problem has persisted from the 1990s and remains a problem for utilities - as I said I heard a presentation yesterday that wasn't that different from presentations on the same topic I and others gave a quarter of a century ago.

Over the years the poor CAD/GIS interoperability has cost the utility and telecom sectors considerable amounts of money. Large telecoms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to cleanup their GIS data and streamline their CAD+GIS workflows. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests this problem has cost directly and indirectly trillions of dollars over the past 20 years. In addition unreliable and out-of-date network infrastructure data that results from this problem has safety implications.  

The juncture between distinct sectors each with its own technologies and business models, AEC (Autodesk, Bentley, and others) and geospatial (ESRI, Hexagon, and others), has analogies with the clash of tectonic plates and the associated incessant seismic events. In the mid-1990s pressure from customers motivated Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of CAD and GIS, to attempt to collaborate to address the CAD+GIS problem. The result of the agreement between Jack Dangermond and Carol Bartz at the time resulted in an unsuccessful product called ArcCAD, which satisfied neither CAD nor GIS users.

Averting a tectonic clash repeat: BIM+geospatial interoperability

The prospect that, by analogy with CAD+GIS problem, we could still be individually finding solutions to BIM/geospatial integration 20 years from now is discouraging. While there are parallels between CAD/GIS and BIM/geospatial, there are grounds for optimism that this time around we may find ways the address the problem in a general way. Firstly, in the mid 1990s there were virtually no geospatial or 3D AEC data standards. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and builsingSmart were both only founded in 1994. It required quite a while for the OGC geospatial and buildingSmart's IFC standards to broadly penetrate industry and government.  Nowadays, there are many widely adopted geospatial standards; Simple Features for SQL, WMS, WFS, GML, KML, InfraGML, CityGML to name just a few from the OGC. buildingSmart's IFC standard is supported by all major BIM design tools including the market leader Revit.

Perhaps most significantly there has been significant progress in developing common conceptual models for geospatial and AEC views of city infrastructure. The major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016. The LandInfra conceptual model was developed by Bentley Systems, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International and provides a unifying basis for land and civil engineering standards including the OGC's InfraGML and buildingSmart International's IFC for infrastructure standards.  InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities. InfraGML supports a subset of the existing LandXML standard. buildingSmart International's IFC-Alignment project uses this common conceptual model of alignments for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges. The objectives of the IFC-Alignment project is to enable the exchange of alignment information through the full infrastructure lifecycle from planning through design and construction to asset management.

Secondly, in the 1990s and the early 2000s there were few open source geospatial projects. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) was only founded in 2006. Since then there has been rapid development of open source geospatial projects. There is enough open source geospatial code now that at the GEO|Design+BIM conference in Amsterdam, Sanghee Shin described a web-based geo-platform integrating massive, complex BIM models using open source geospatial libraries and tools including PostGIS, GeoServer, and Cesium and NASA WorldWind virtual globes. The importance of this project is that it shows that it is possible using the available open source geospatial APIs and libraries - together with some genuine innovative development - to create an open, non-proprietary, 3D geospatial platform for integrating geospatial and BIM. Given the critical importance of addressing the cultural and technical divide between the AEC and geospatial worlds, clearly many believe that a viable open source alternative will be essential for developing the innovative solutions to the challenge of interfacing the two worlds. 

Finally, major players in the AEC and geospatial industries, Autodesk and ESRI, have again agreed to collaborate. This time around they are probably more aware of the technical issues hindering BIM+geospatial integration. Both have adopted open standards when it made business sense - often under pressure from government clients - and both have also adopted open source technology where it made business sense. Together the combination of major players supporting the effort, standards organization like the OGC and buildingSmart already working to address the problem, and a broad range of open source code and a vibrant developer community may be enough to address the technical problems. If building and infrastructure owners and facilities managers including government as well as regulators become aware of the risk of not solving the problem, a solution may be found so that we will not be having the same BIM+geospatial integration discussion a quarter of a century from now.

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.

OGC issues RFI for underground infrastructure maps and models

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced the initiation of a three-phase project to develop interoperability standards for underground infrastructure. The underground infrastructure data interoperability project will take two and a half years to complete and will involve the collaboration of many cities, utilities, and engineering and technology companies.

In the U.S. it is estimated that an underground utility is hit about every minute.  Underground utility conflicts and relocations are the number one cause for project delays during road construction.  Assuming the average cost of underground strikes is roughly $1000 per strike, the estimated total cost to the U.S. economy is $1.5 trillion annually.  Currently, the exchange of underground utility information between infrastructure organizations within the same jurisdiction or in adjacent jurisdictions has been greatly hampered by incompatible and incomplete data. OGC anticipates that this project will make a significant contribution towards facilitating improved information management and secure sharing and collaboration, which should make infrastructure planning, operations & maintenance, and emergency response less costly and time consuming, and more effective.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) to inform a Concept Development Study (CDS) that will assess the current state and future direction of information standards for modelling, mapping, and managing underground infrastructure.

The CDS will define the scope of a multi-phase underground infrastructure interoperability project. The purpose of the study is to develop an in-depth understanding of all the components necessary to enable infrastructure data interoperability and standards in an underground environment. The CDS is initially focused on the urban landscape. This RFI is a first step in the CDS process. Any organization with an interest in underground infrastructure is invited to respond to the RFI before 15 March 2017.

This initiative is supported by the Fund for the City of New York, the Singapore Land Authority, the Ordnance Survey and the OGC Innovation Program.

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.