Between the Poles

OGC initiates development of interoperability standards for underground infrastructure

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced today the initiation of a three-phase project to develop interoperability standards for underground infrastructure.  The project is supported by the Fund for the City of New York and its sister organization, the National Center for Civic Innovation, the Ordnance Survey and other organizations. 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.

About 4 million excavations are carried out on the UK road network each year 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.  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.

In addition to excavations for construction another prevalent problem with undergound infrastructure are cross bores.  Cross bores are gas, power or telecom cables and pipes that bisect sewer pipes.  Horizontal directional drilling (HDD), percussion moles and plows are trenchless techniques used to install natural gas distribution and other utility lines. These boring drill heads can easily go through sewer pipes without the driller being aware of it. Since the location of underground sewer pipes, either main line or laterals connecting the main pipes to houses, are only poorly known, cross bores are widespread. Increased recognition of the injury, death and damage caused from cross bores has resulted in federal and state regulatory action. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2011 Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s (PHMSA) requirements of Distribution Integrity Management Program (DIMP) is intended to increase the integrity of gas distribution systems. Finding these problems is big business.  It is estimated that in the U.S. the total market for identifying and geolocating cross bores is about $1 billion per year.

An economic analysis of the costs and benefits of applying GPR to detect the location of underground infrastructure in Milan estimated that the return on investment is about €16 for every euro invested in improving the reliability information of underground infrastructure.  For comparison the ROI in the United States has been estimated to range up to $21 for every dollar invested. This does not include other important, but non-quantifiable benefits including better safety for both workers and the public as well as fewer traffic disruptions.

In the U.S. there is the ASCE standard (A,B,C,D) that is widely used for classifying location information about underground infrastructure according to its estimated reliability.  The U.S. standard does not include explicit precision.  A,B, C, and D refer to different ways of collecting information about underground infrastructure.

In France there is a standard that define three levels of cartographic accuracy for underground structures. The French standard defines explicitly levels precision.

In the UK the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 128 developed under the auspices of the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE).  It not only includes A,B, C, D levels similar to the U.S. standard, but also includes explicit levels of precision levels (Bx).

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, sharing and collaboration which should make infrastructure planning, operations and maintenance, and emergency response less costly and time consuming, and more effective.

Underground infrastructure networks play essential roles in supplying the resources necessary to make communities livable and functional. Each of these networks can be found alongside each other under city streets, and every building has multiple connections. Interdependencies between different underground networks make things even more complex. In addition to modelling the underground infrastructure, the project will look at ways to model the soil and related components that surround the underground infrastructure networks. These components can affect the ageing and maintenance schedules of infrastructure, and include bedrock, the water table, underground streams, adjacent water bodies, foundations, basements, sidewalks, sidewalk vaults, street beds, etc.

The OGC underground infrastructure project will be undertaken in parallel with efforts by the City of New York to assess its own infrastructure information and to find ways of improving integration, analysis, and emergency response while ensuring data security. It is expected that the projects will be mutually supportive.

Revolution in the electric power industry: distributed energy and microgrids

Anne Pramaggiore, President and CEO of ComEd of Chicago, was the first at the Smart Gird Interoperability Panel 2016 Grid Modernization Summit in Washington DC to call the current business transformation that the electric power industry is experiencing a revolution.  But many other speakers agreed with this characterization.  Frequently mentioned were the regulatory and utility business transformations occurring in California and New York (REV).  Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) was mentioned as an example of a utility that was aggressively driving change in the utility business model. 

Robert Wilhite of Navigant Research pointed out that their recent research had found that 90% of utilities recognize that utility business models have to change.  But there are different opinions about the urgency of this transformation.  Navigant found that about half believe that it has to happen immediately, while the remainder believe it can happen later. 

Of course none of this would be possible without the enabling technology of the smart grid.  Dave Velazguez, President and CEO of Pepco, now part of Exelon, recollected that the first smart grid development at Pepco, by no means a laggard in adopting new technology, occurred only a decade ago.

Distributed energy

Virtually every speaker singled out distributed energy (DER), especially solarPV, as the main motivating driver that is forcing the business transformation of the utility industry.   Originally seen as a response to a warming climate, solarPV has achieved grid parity in several parts of the country and is seen as a way of providing customers not only with a choice of a green energy source but increasingly as a less expensive alternative to the local utility.   The price drop has been so substantial that even at a time of unusually low natural gas prices that are responsible for closing many coal-fired generation plants solarPV is achieving grid parity in many parts of North America.  Another important contributor to the revolution is the electrification of transportation, not only EVs but also buses, rail and even trucks.  

But none of this could have happened without the enabling platform of the smart grid.   The conjunction of technological advances in packet switched wired and wireless communications networks, intelligent electronic devices underlies the DER advances that have created choice for customers.  As we have seen previously in other industries such as telecom consumers have grasped the opportunity and are now beginning to drive changes in the energy market.

Microgrids

Another topic that came up repeatedly was microgrids.  Duke Energy has been running microgrid pilot for several years from which emerged the OpenFMB standard with an OpenFMB working group to support the effort. ComEd has five microgrid pilots and is starting the country's first microgrid cluster.  Pepco has two microgrid projects underway.

At the Distributech 2016 and at this SGIP Summit an implementation of OpenFMB demonstrated live by Green Energy Corp.  It was also announced at the summit that the source code was now available for download from the openFMB.io site. 

In addition a number of vendors were offering solutions for managing microgrids including the KEPCO Consortium from Korea who has built a comprehensive microgrid solution.

Geospatial

Although this was not a geospatially-focussed conference, GIS and geospatial technology came up in several areas.

Chanda Visweswanah, an IBM fellow, outlined in three topics what the the challenge is in transforming the grid.  First, there are several trends that are behaving exponentially, the number of sensors, the volume of data, and renewable energy sources were among them.  Secondly, we are increasingly relying on intermittent energy sources like wind and solarPV.  Third, this is not you grandmother's software.  This is software that provides a platform that supports sophisticated mathematical algorithms.  One of the most important of these are algorithms that nowcast and forecast weather at a very high resolution so that it is possible to predict wind velocity not at ground level but at the elevation of the turbines and at the location of the wind farm.  Similarly for insolation for solarPV.  These wind and insolation maps are effectively are the generation forecast minutes and hours in advance.

The Kepco Consortium demonstrated the μ-Grid platform.  Kepco have already partnered with PowerStream in Ontario to provide a utility-scale microgrid.  Earlier this year PowerStream and Kepco officially launched a utility-scaled Microgrid, which has the capacity to provide several hours of backup power supply for approximately 400 customers residing or owning a business in Penetanguishene. The Microgrid is helping to reinforce the existing grid by increasing resiliency and operational flexibility.  The platform provides a GIS Studio which allows grid 35 types of power facilities such as transformers to be visulaized and edited on a map, either imagery form satellites or overflights or a topographic map.

Another application of geloocation is in the area of cybersecurity where location is used by advanced cybersecurity applications for verifying identity.

Distributed intelligence

Several speakers pointed out that the volume of data has simply become to large for a centralized IT system that collects all the data at a central control point where analysis and visualization is performed.  By pushing intelligence out into the field, it reduces the data volumes that have to be handled at the central station and reduces the data flow over the network. 

Standards

Orange Button

Based on the very successful Green Button program, an important standards initiative is Orange Button.  It was initiated by the Department of Energy (DOE) with the objective of making it easier for investment to flow into solar power by standardizing electronic reporting of solar installation performance.  Orange Button targets a reduction in soft costs by streamlining the collection, security, management, exchange, and monetizing of solar datasets across the value chain of solar. It is expected that creating an industry-driven standardized data landscape will facilitate the growth and expansion of distributed solar. As the solar market continues to expand, it is critical that the collection, management, and exchange of solar datasets – especially those that affect the bankability (ability to secure loans for solar installations) of solar assets – are coordinated and streamlined to protect consumers, increase efficient pricing, and support new and existing businesses entering the solar marketplace. In April of this year four awardees (kWh Analytics, National Renewable Energy Laboratory,  Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, and SunSpec Alliance) were announced by the Department of Energy that will collaborate on the overall goal to standardize the way solar data is collected and exchanged.  SGIP was chosen to lead the effort.

At SGIP the effort is being led and coordinated by Dixon Wright of Wells Fargo.  Dixon is the only person that I was aware of representing a financial institution at the SGIP event.  I think that the presence of a major financial player such as Wells Fargo is a strong indication that solar is moving into the big leagues of financing. Dixon is passionate about the Orange Button initiative and believes that once a draft standard and implementation becomes available and a few users champion it, it will catch on rapidly with the large financial institutions and the solar industry.

OpenFMB

In March 2015, the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) formally kicked-off its OpenFMB effort to foster field interoperability drawing upon Duke Energy’s previous Coalition of the Willing I and Distributed Intelligence Platform work. By the 2015 SGIP Annual Conference in November, three microgrid use cases had been developed and demonstrated: optimization, unscheduled islanding, and grid reconnection.

In February 2016, the first OpenFMB reference implementation, utilizing SGIP’s microgrid use cases at Duke Energy’s Mount Holly microgrid test center, was demonstrated at the 2016 DistribuTECH Conference by Duke Energy’s Coalition of the Willing II (COW-II) vendor partners. For the annual SGIP Grid Modernization Summit in November 2016 the SGIP OpenFMB task force published a series of related foundational use cases that center on Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Circuit Segment Management for the active coordination of power systems equipment to DER, including a microgrid.  Green Energ Corp demonstrated an OpenFMB implementation connecting a solar PV installation with other equipment and applications.   This is an open source project and it was announced at the SGIP event that the source code is now available and can be downloaded from openfmb.io.  There is a free webinar replay "SGIP Grid Modernization Summit OpenFMB Demo Preview."  

Interoperability

Several speakers were on hand from the Department of Energy's Gris Modernization labs.  Since this was an SGIP event they focussed on the research underway at 13 Federal labs and 150 partner organizations that involves interoperability.  First of all research is underway to find a way to measure interoperability.  Secondly, there is an important initiative underwritten by several million dollars of financing to determine how to value interoperability.  If we can quantify the contribution it makes to business efficiencies by enhancing the opportunity for competitve products, by creating standards-based platforms that intelligent products from different vendors, whether smart meters, synchrophasors, reclosers, or substation components can plug and play with, that ultimately reduces prices for utilities, then it will be easier to justify and priorize greater investment  the standards and implementations that provide interoperability.

Testing and certifying smart grid interoperability

An important milestone for defining testing and certification for  smart grid interoperability is the publication of a new standard, the Smart Grid Interoperability Process Reference Manual (IPRM).  This new standard is a joint effort by the NEMA Distribution Automation Technical Committee and Smart Grid Interoperability Panel’s (SGIP) Smart Grid Testing and Certification Committee (SGTCC). 

Geospatial technology is becoming a foundation technology for the smart grid.  Most smart grid data includes location whether it is the location of a transformer, a smart meter, or other equipment, an outage, or a weather map used for forecasting output from distributed generation facilities (solar and wind). As defined in the NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 3.0 ,  SGIP standards rely on the Geographic Markup Language (GML) standard from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for location information.  OGC and SGIP have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work together on integrating geospatial with smart grid standards in the electric power sector.

SGTCC was one of the first standing committees established by SGIP. The committee is responsible for constructing an operational framework for the testing and certification process that will enable smart grid interoperability.

“This standard [IPRM] defines requirements and recommendations for general test policies, test suite specifications, test profiles, interoperability testing and certification authority technical programs, governance, laboratory qualifications, and process improvements. It also describes an implementation approach."

The IPRM standard defines a process by which industry stakeholders may procure, test, and assert interoperability between different vendors of smart grid products. The IPRM process defines requirements and recommendations for general test policies, test suite specifications, test profiles, interoperability testing and certification authority technical programs, governance, laboratory qualifications, and process improvements.

New OGC standards incubator lowers the bar on overhead

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards process is quite nimble compared to other standards development processes, but it still involves multiple steps and the overhead of the formal process discourages developers from participating.  For reference the Request for Comment (RFC) procedure is the most common way for a candidate standard to enter into the OGC standards approval process.  A very good guide has been prepared for submitting an RFC to the OGC and then manoeuvring the candidate standard to final formal adoption.

 

The OGC has been moving in the direction of a simpler developer-friendly process for standards development.  An important motivation has been input from the open source community.  Last year Chris Holmes, who was unhappy with the progress in the development of a standard called GeoPackage, decided to join the GeoPackage Standards Working Group (SWG), to learn about how the OGC standards process actually worked so as to be able to offer some suggestions for improvement from an open source software perspective.  This was important for the OGC perspective for two reasons.  First of all, open source geospatial is an important and growing segment of the geospatial software community, and secondly "open source loves standards" so that historically the first implementations of a standard and the first adopters have often come from the open source community.

It turned out that OGC staff and the members of the SWG were open to new ways of working and the SWG achieved an OGC first by putting the GeoPackage specification out on GitHub, to make it accessible to the open source community.  The traditional OGC way is wikis and Word docs.  For folks without GitHub experience the SWG prepared tips on how to contribute to the GeoPackage specification without having to learn git.  For the OGC putting the specification on GitHub was an experiment, which turned out positively. The resulting standard benefitted from the direct involvement of open source geospatial developers in the OGC standards specification processes. The result was an alternative standards process that focused on early implementations of the standard. The standards process itself was improved by reducing the overhead in the formal OGC process.

The OGC is now taken this one step further and is working on a "standards incubator".  The goal is to make OGC processes even more nimble and responsive to rapidly evolving technology. The standards incubator is intended to provide a setting for members to build and evaluate innovative draft standards in a process that mimics the usual OGC standards development process, but does not result in an official OGC standard.  It is intended to reduce overhead to zero in order to provide a minimalist formal process.

DistribuTECH2016: By 2020 the largest power utility will not own generation or network assets

Today at DistribuTECH2016, three very distinguished, experienced people in the technology business, Zarko Sumic, Distinguised Analyst at Gartner; Chandu Visweswariah, IBM Fellow; and Sharon Allan, CEO of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), each presented their perspective on the utility sector of the future.  What emerged appeared to be the same remarkable animal but from three different perspectives. 

 

Zarko started by pointing out the extraordinary coincidence that Facebook (market cap $230b), Uber (est value $50 B), and Airbnb (est value $24 B) are the largest (or the second largest in the case of Airbnb) companies in their line of business, but significantly none of them own content, cars or rooms.  Zarko and Gartner call this phenomenon the sharing economy.   A sharing economy uses IT to distribute, share and reuse excess capacity in goods and services. Information is the fuel and the digital platform is the engine.  The sharing economy operates in a market with customers and sellers and the value of the goods and services shared is determined by the network effect (Metcalfe's law) and increases as the square of the number of nodes (customers and sellers).  

 

Zarko sees an analogy with the electric power industry today, as we move toward a world where energy flows are increasingly determined by market forces (referred to as transactive energy).   Based on the analogy with Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb Zarko predicts that by 2020, the largest energy company in the world (by market cap) will not own any network (grid) or generation assets.  It will manage information about energy sources and consumers.   He does not see any technical barriers to this vision.  The only thing standing in the way at the moment is current regulation.

 

The utility digital distribution platform creates new value by enabling an open energy market which brings together those who have energy with those who want it.  It requires a network operator who manages and ensures the reliability of the grid (similar to the role of Network Rail in the UK) and a sharing energy economy platform operator (like Facebook, Uber and Airbnb) who brings together energy providers and buyers including prosumers, and calculates transaction and delivery costs. 

 

Chandu put it this way, "energy is getting digitized".  His perspective is that renewable energy, whether wind or solar, introduces a major element of variability into power networks which is seven times greater than in our current networks where most of the variability is due to demand.  Weather is the source of most of the variability.  Predicting when the wind will blow and with what force and cloud cover are critical for managing future power networks in addition to predicting and managing demand with techniques such as demand response.  IBM has two major projects based on predicting these external factors, Deep Thunder for weather prediction and Opus for a power project whose first implementation is in Vermont.  In Chandu's view time of use pricing, demand response, and other programs are practical examples of capabilities that utilities have already implemented and that are required to support transactive energy that underpins all three's vision.  Transactive energy means fundamentally that market forces control the flow of energy.   It requires price signals from the energy supplier and demand signals from the buyer. 

 

Sharon shares a similar long term vision of the energy sector and also sees transactive energy as the future toward which the sector is heading.  It is the consumer that is driving the industry.  As Jon Wellinghof, ex-chairman of FERC put itthis way

 

"Advances in technology and the desire we are seeing at the consumer level to have control and the ability to know that they can ensure the reliability of their system within their home, business, microgrid or their community. People are going to continue to drive towards having these kinds of technologies available to them. And once that happens through the technologies and the entrepreneurial spirit we are seeing with these companies coming in, I just don't see how we can continue with the same model we have had for the last 100 or 150 years."

She gave a number of examples of how interoperability standards from IEEE, IEC, and SGIP; programs from government agencies such as the Department of Energy, ARPA-E and Pacific NW National Lab (PNNL); and industry organizations such as EPRI are moving toward a common vision of the utility of the future.   Sharon put it very strongly in front of a room filled with utility employees and vendors and consultants, "get ready for transactive energy, this is real, this is not hype."

 

Highlights of GeoBuiz Summit: Intel's indoor positioning chipset

I spent a couple of of very worthwhile days in Washington DC this week attending GeoBuiz Summit.  A top highlight of the sessions was the presentation by Greg Turetzky, Principal Engineer in the GNSS and Location Strategy group at Intel.  Greg described a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices that includes in-chip support for indoor location positioning.

Indoor mapping is already supported by Google and Bing.  Micello is in the business of creating indoor maps of major venues around the world.  Most of the activity seems to be focussed on consumers and locations such as malls, airports and department stores.  A typical indoor application would lead you directly to particular products in a mall or department store.

The major problem that distinguishes indoor from outdoor location and mapping is that there is no widely recognized indoor equivalent of GPS.  When you are outside of buildings on most of the Earth's surface you can use GPS or other GNSS systems  to determine where you, other people and things are.  But as soon as you walk into a building, GPS no longer works.  Tracking people and objects in a building has been one of the major challenges facing the geospatial industry.

There have been many attempts to solve this problem.  Tracking cell phone location using RFID, accelerometers, or installing transmitters with low frequency radio frequency waves that are not as affected by walls as high frequency waves.  The prevalence of WiFi has made possible using Wifi signals from transmitters with known locations to triangulate location.

The business benefit of indoor location is significant because it increases the value of your assets - when you can locate equipment and facilities easily, you will use them more.  In the case of hospitals it can be a matter of life and death to find the "crash cart" in seconds rather than minutes.

The Open Geospatial Consortium's  IndoorGML Standards Working Group has released an IndoorGML Encoding Standard.  IndoorGML has been developed to provide a schema framework for interoperability between indoor spatial applications such as indoor location services, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics.  The IndoorGML standard specifies an open data model and XML schema for indoor spatial information. IndoorGML is an application schema of OGC GML and intentionally focuses on modelling indoor spaces for navigation purposes.

Intel's 8270 chipset, which is based on the 802.11mc standard, is able to provide 2-3 meter accuracy 90% of the time.  Intel's indoor location technology relies on fine time measurement (FTM) which measures the distance between a handheld device and 802.11mc-compliant Wi-Fi access points.  Multilateration is used to compute the device's location.

The chipset is available.  There is a video of the chipset in use.  Intel is encouraging geospatial developers to create mobile apps using the chipset.

Powering up the smart grid with geospatial technology

The electricity industry is undergoing a transformation. With utilities embracing geospatial technology and turning into data driven enterprises in the Smart Grid scenario, the sector is staring at an innovative future.

The National Academy of Engineering identifies the electric power grid as the first of 20 major engineering achievements that has had the greatest impact on the quality of life in the 20th Century. Modern society has reached a point where virtually every crucial economic and social function depends on the secure, reliable operation of electric power infrastructure.  But because it has become so crucial for modern life, it faces major challenges.
   
The major drivers for the fundamental change underway in the electric power industry are increasing demand, universal access, decarbonizing electric power, reducing revenue losses, and grid reliability and resilience.  Some of the  technologies that are contributing to this transformation are intelligent devices integrated with a communications network, distributed renewable power generation especially wind and solar PV, net zero energy buildings, microgrids, and the new remote sensing technologies of subsurface utility engineering.  

For an industry not known historically for rapid change, many utilities are in the midst of transforming themselves into data driven enterprises. Recently IDC published its future predictions for the development of the electric power industry over the period 2015-2018.  For many in the industry these are quite startling and clearly reflect an industry that is rapidly evolving.

The technology roadmap for the smart grid involves the deployment of increasing numbers of intelligent electronic devices for sensing and for control.  The challenge is federating the data from all of these devices, extracting information from it, and dispatching the information to the right control devices. 
 
With the changes that the electric power industry is undergoing now, analysts see geospatial technology poised to become a foundation technology for the smart grid.  The role of utility GIS is expected to touch every aspect of a utilities business, affecting customers, operations and management because geospatial is the logical technology that can provide  the basis for integrating data from intelligent electronic devices such as smart meters and the  information silos associated with proprietary applications.

You can read more about smart grid and relevance of geospatial data and technology, real-time big spatial data, standards for interoperability, the importance of data quality, open source geospatial technology,  spatial analytics and other aspects of the role of geospatial technology in the smart grid in Geospatial World.

New journal for open geospatial data, standards and interoperability

A new open journal Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards provides an advanced forum for the science and technology of open data, crowdsourced information, and sensor web through the publication of reviews and regular research papers. The journal publishes articles that address issues related, but not limited to, the analysis and processing of open geo-data, standardization and interoperability of open geo-data and services, as well as applications based on open geo-data. The journal is also meant to be a space for theories, methods and applications related to crowdsourcing, volunteered geographic information, as well as sensor web and related topics.

Convergence of BIM and geospatial contributes to better management of information

Dr Anne Kemp, Director and Fellow, Atkins, Vice-Chair of BuildingSmart, UK, Chair of ICE BIM Action Group, and Chair of BIM4Infrastructure UK, has published very thought-provoking insights into how the convergence of BIM and geospatial can contribute to the better management of information to help generate the understanding to make better decisions.

Her first assertion “So, let’s put paid to the hang-ups of what is and is not GIS and BIM, and discover what really deserves our focus” is a very good place for all of us to start if we are going to tear down the discipline boundaries that are inhibiting us from moving to a more holistic approach to problem solving in the era of smart cities.

Better outcomes, not BIM or geospatial

Her goal is not to support BIM or geospatial per se, but to use these technologies to improve outcomes.  From Anne's perspective the key outcomes we should be aiming at are

• CLARITY - Clarity of delivery
• TECHNICAL JUDGEMENT - Converging information production with sound engineering judgment and design
• ACCESS - Wider, faster access to comprehensible and integrated information
• LATERAL THINKING - Enabling reflective, adaptive thinking to incorporate whole life and integrated systems approach within the wider geographic context
• INNOVATION - Harnessing innovative technologies and harvesting intelligence from big data
• DECISIONS - Fostering instinctive, but rigorous collaboration and better decision making

Data, not documents

The construction industry is based on documents such as drawings. Documents lock data up within a discipline and prevents the wider access that can be used to build up an integrated view of an asset. In contrast digital data can be used, many times, for different purposes, by different disciplines.  This requires interoperability and the ability to map semantics across different disciplines.

Assets, not projects

The full lifecycle view of a building, road or airport requires thinking of assets not projects. Anne's perspective is that this is where the convergence of BIM with geospatial provides the biggest benefits. The UK government would agree. The short term objective of the UK Government BIM mandate is to reduce the cost of construction (design, tender, build) by 20%.  The longer term objective is by 2025 to reduce the costs associated with designing, building, operating and maintaining buildings and infrastructure by a third.  ‘In-use’ data from facilities management (FM) systems, building management  systems, and sensors including smart phones provides information on how an asset is actually serving the needs of people, and the patterns of behaviour of people using the infrastructure.  This information can be used to optimize building or infrastructure design. A geospatial perspective enables this data to be used not only with individual buildings or infrastructure, but for a whole neighbourhood, town or city.

Data ethics

Ensuring that data is not manipulated to distort decision making is critical to enabling the true data-driven organization of the future. Anne's perspective is that the industry is becoming increasingly dependent on data management professionals. This will require standards and a code of ethics to address challenges of privacy, distortion, and manipulation so as to ensure that data is made available in a way that aids rather than confuses decision making. In the future chief data officers and other information professionals will have even much greater responsibilities - they will be responsible for specifying, collecting, and analyzing the information for decision making that will be critical to the organization's success, even its existence.

Information is not understanding

Malcolm Gladwell in "Blink" points out that “We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

At a recent BIM conference the term “infobesity” came up more than once. A decade ago people were concerned about not having enough data to make informed decisions. Now that we have more data being collected by sensors such as smart meters and smart phones, the problem is how do we make sense from the huge volumes of data that all these smart devices are collecting.

Anne makes the point that when managed correctly, “instant” decisions based on a small amount of data are not just as good, but can be better than those made after analyzing all available data. The "less is more" challenge is to distill the data to just the right subset to enable you can make better decisions faster with less data. Anne believes that this will require more sophisticated visualization techniques to enable insights from patterns in large amounts of data and better collaboration technology to enable a large number of individuals from different disciplines to understand each other (even when using different terms for the same piece of equipment or construction material) and to collaborate fruitfully.

This means that we will be asking our human or computer information  engineers to deliver that essential subset of information to the right people at the right time, and in an intuitively understandable way.  Anne suggests that our cartographic and GIS heritage of creating, analyzing and visualizing a view of the physical world as maps may provide a model for future data managers.  But, as Anne points out, this will have to be transformed for a virtual environment.

Unintended consequences

Anne's final point is often overlooked. BIM, geospatial, augmented reality and other technologies are transforming how we view "reality".  There are very real consequences for people working in a virtual world. Anne mentions the first case of internet addition disorder (IAD) involving Google Glasses on October 14, 2014 and asks how many of us are already there with our smartphones and tablets ?

State of BIM delivery in the UK one year before government mandate

One of the highlights of this this year's RICS BIM Conference in London was the keynote presentation Delivery of Level 2 BIM by Terry Stocks, Deputy Head of Estates Department, Ministry of Justice and  Delivery Director for Level 2 BIM, UK BIM Task Force.  

As people in the construction industry are aware, next year all central government construction projects (which represents about half of the construction industry in the UK) will require building information modeling (BIM) Level 2.  The short term objective is to reduce the cost of construction (design, tender, build) by 20%.  The longer term objective is by 2025 to reduce the costs associated with designing, building, operating and maintaining buildings and infrastructure by a third.

An industry survey in the UK last year reported that 54% of respondents in 2013 said that they were using BIM on projects.  Most of those not yet using BIM said that they would be within one to two years.  70 % of the respondents reporting using BIM said that BIM has given them a competitive advantage.  Terry's perspective is that BIM is fast becoming the standard way of working for designers and contractors on most construction projects - public and private.

Goal: Avoiding waste

Terry pointed to a recent Economist article which included statistics that explain the primary driving force - avoiding waste - behind BIM adoption around the world.    According to the Economist 30% of the construction process is rework, 50% of the labour effort is wasted, and there is a further 10% loss due to wasted materials.  Even more critically for the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecyle, 3-5% of the construction turnover is lost at the discipline interface (design, tender, construct, and operate).  The discipline interface data loss  resembles a sawtooth diagram with the result that the construction information required to maintain and operate the building is often inaccurate and incomplete.  

An important objective of the full lifecycle BIM initiative is to smooth delivery and avoid data loss at the discipline interfaces.  Some of the key ways to enable this to happen are collaborative early engagement including clients (owners), designers, contractors, and facilities managers (FM) from the beginning and improving inter-discipline interoperability to improve the transfer of information between the  client, designers, the main contractor, sub contractors, and facilities managers. For example, all handover data will be provided in a structured format “COBie UK 2012”.

One of the challenges relating to data that several speakers mentioned is "infobesity" - attempting to collect and maintain  too much data.  The simple guideline suggested to avoid this problem is to only collect data that you have the resources to maintain (keep up-to-date) and that contributes significantly to operational efficiency.   This requires close collaboration between the owner, facilities managers, designers and contractors from the beginning of a project.

Delivery of BIM Level 2

BIM Level 2 is a set of discipline-specific models (architectural, structural, HVAC, services, etc) with a single environment to store shared data and information.  The delivery of BIM Level 2 in the UK is the responsibility of the UK BIM Task Force supported by  key government departments.  It involves building knowledge and capability in government departments, building capability in the supply chain, and encouraging BIM capacity development in the private sector through initiatives such as BIM4SME and other BIM4 community development efforts. One of the most important initiatives is the development and publication of seven key documents which collectively represent an impressive repository of BIM best practices.  Just about every speaker at the RICS BIM conference referenced these documents.

• PAS 1192:2  - Specification for information management for the capital/delivery phase of construction projects using BIM
• PAS 1192:3 - Framework for an asset owning or operating organization to identify its information requirements and to create an asset information model with a governance method.
• BS 1192-4 - Collaborative production of information: Fulfilling employers information exchange requirements using COBie.  All handover data will be provided in a structured format “COBie UK 2012”.
  
• CIC BIM Protocol - The BIM Protocol is a supplementary legal agreement that is incorporated into professional services appointments and construction contracts by means of a simple amendment.  The Protocol creates additional obligations and rights for the employer and the contracted party.
• Classification - A series of tables which classify all aspects of the life cycle of a project to structure data in order to support the BIM process and facilitate collaboration. Expected to be based on CPIC Uniclass 2. (Under development)
• Digital Plan of Works / Levels of Detail (LoD) - Documents the concepts and detail of the management of built asset data derived from the process of building and managing  building information models including how this data is defined, tested and effectively used by both the supply chain and the public client. Level of Detail specifies the level of geometric information a model should exhibit. (Under development)
• Government Soft Landings - "Design for operation" to encourage better outcomes using BIM for built assets during the design and construction stages to ensure value is achieved in the operational lifecycle of an asset.  For example, early engagement of the end user (owner) during design and construction through to operational handover using BIM to provide a fully populated asset data set into the end user's facilities management system.

Savings attributed to BIM

Seven major government projects worth about £ 10 billion which are currently using BIM maintain records of the savings they have seen from using BIM. The measured benefits of BIM and factors associated with BIM range between15-20%, and are primarily realized during design, pre-construction, and construction.   The government estimates that it has achieved savings of £ 1.4 billion through BIM and related improvements in the 2013/2014 fiscal year.

Full lifecyle cost savings

With full lifecyle BIM, the government sees an upside potential of 40%+ with the biggest benefits being realized in the operations phase of the building lifecycle.