Between the Poles

SPAR 3D: Virtual reality, scan to BIM, infrastructure models, and mapping indoor spaces

I have just experienced two remarkable days at the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, in itself a remarkable location near Houston.  I will blog in more detail in the near future about the things and people I had the opportunity to experience over the past two days.

First of all, virtual reality.  Everyone is aware of the Oculus Rift (see the new review at CNET if you aren't).  There are other technologies that have come or are coming from Samsung, Sony and Google.  But at SPAR 3D the most remarkable VR technology I personally experienced was what David Smith, CTO of Wearaility, talked about and allowed me and others to try - a set of incredibly light-weight glasses with acrylic lenses designed to work with a smartphone that gives you a virtual experience comparable to IMAX without the IMAX theatre.  I tried it and found it an absolutely amazing surround experience.  And if you have wondered where Michael Jones, of Keyhole and Google Maps fame, has landed, he is now CEO of Wearality.

Secondly, my personal passion is the geolocation of underground utilities.  At SPAR 3D Mark Klusza, Founder & CTO, Real-time Metrology, Inc. described a major new advance in ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology he has developed that can detect a 3/4 inch rebar (among other things) four feet below the surface in clay.

For existing buildings creating a BIM model remains an art rather than science.  But at SPAR 3D a number of new technologies were presented that can help automate, improve the quality, and speed the process.  Foremost among them in my mind was presented by Nicolas Arnold, VP of Product Development, at SKUR.  With SKUR's technology, which runs in the cloud, you can compare the 3D model that you have developed with the point cloud you derived the model from and identify all the points of significant variance.  The same technology can also be used during a construction project to compare what has been built to what was designed - even when the building is only partially completed.

Ron Singh, Engineering Automation Manager/Chief of Surveys, Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) described progress on his remarkable vision of how automation is upending how we design, build and monitor, operate and maintain U.S. highway systems.  Richard Arrowsmith, Asset Information Group Team Leader, Highways England described the digital model of the English highway system.  Stan Burns, President, Integrated Inventory, who has just retired from Utah DoT, described Utah DoT's comprehensive database of every piece of highway furniture and signage in the Utah highway system.  Together these represent the future of the digitalization of national highway systems.

A new company, Indoor Reality, is the third startup of Dr Avideh Zakhor, who is on leave from the University of California Berkeley.  Her new device is a backpack loaded with sensors including lasers and infrared that enables you to map the interior of buildings by simply walking through a multi-floor building, including up and down stairs.  The resulting data can be used to automatically generate floor plans and 3D models and captures everything you need for an Energy Plus analysis.

Mark Shell and Darrell Gadberry, both of the City of Fort Worth Water Department, described a very versatile device with laser and sonar and camera devices on board that can be used for sewer line inspections of small and large diameter sewer pipes.  Fundamentally this device enables condition-based maintenance of municipal sewer systems.  Mark and Darrell reported that it has saved the Fort Worth Water Department $42 million.

I was able to interview Dr Avideh Zakhor, Nicolas Arnold, Ron Singh, Larry Kleinkemper of Lanmar Services who specialize in creating BIM models for existing buildings, and Greg Bentley of Bentley who has a broad, forward-looking perspective on the "digitalization" of infrastructure.

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Singapore's national 3D model wins Be Inspired Award at YII2015

At the the Year in Infrastructure conference in London the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) won the annual Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Government.  Comprising only 700 square kilometers for the entire nation, land is a valuable and critical national resource for Singapore and the Singapore Land Authority is responsible for making the most of the resource. 

Specifically SLA is responsible for the national land management system and for all geographical information (GIS) management.  At the Be Inspired Awards at the Year in Infrastructure 2015 conference in London, I had an opportunity to chat with Victor Khoo and Kean Huat Soon.  Victor Khoo is Deputy Director Land Survey at the SLA and Kean Huat Soon is a Senior Surveyor and the technical lead for the project.

Singapore intends to be the world's first "smart nation".  Part of this initiative involves developing a virtual Singapore that is intended to be the source of authoritative information about Singapore for use by government.  The current priority is a 3D model of buildings and below and above ground infrastructure.

The Mapping Singapore in 3D project is financed 50% by the Government of Singapore and 50% by agencies, primarily the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) and the Public Utilities Board (PUB).   Several government agencies including the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) and the Housing Development Board (HDB) are already using it.  CAAS finds it essential for maintaining aviation glide paths over the city as does the PUB for assessing the impact of flooding. HDB uses it for planning purposes. 

The project involves capturing large amounts of data using multiple rapid mapping technologies including oblique imagery, airborne laser scanning, mobile laser scanning, and terrestrial scanning.  The data is compiled into 3D city model in a single database repository. The database includes geometry, topology, semantics and appearance.  It relies on CityGML, a standard managed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), for the database schema and for data exchange.  The project works at the Level of Detail (LOD) Level 1-3. The data is stored in a single geospatially-enabled relational database (Oracle Spatial).  The total volume of data is more than 50 terabytes.The most challenging part of the project has been the development of business processes and technologies for ensuring the data remains current. The database is open and accessible to all government agencies. 

3D Cadastre

Victor Khoo is also responsible for developing a 3D cadastre for Singapore which is a separate project at SLA.  A 3D cadastre is especially critical for Singapore for several reasons.  85 % of the population of Singapore lives in public high rise buildings. Underground space is heavily used and underground density is increasing.  Land developers are being very creative and packaging complex volumetric parcels that include both underground and above ground. 

A 3D cadastre has data, legal, system and process dimensions.  The legislation required for the legal aspect is already in place.  The system and processes are intended to be completed by the end of 2016.  With respect to data a 3D GIS is being populated at SLA starting with 2D land parcel data.

Land surveyors are an essential part of the 3D cadastre project.  As a first step surveyors are required to use electronic data exchange instead of paper (Singapore mandated electronic submissions for building permitting over a decade ago.)  Singapore has decided to support ePlan LandXML as an open standard for the exchange of survey data.  In 2013 Singapore joined the ePlan working group which is focussed on developing a digital protocol for the transfer of cadastral data between the surveying Industry and government.  The working group was originally made up of technical experts from the eight states and territories of Australia and New Zealand working in the management of cadastral data.

By way of background LandXML is a widely used standard used by the transportation and land development sectors.  A subset of the LandXML standard including alignment, road, rail, survey, terrain, land parcels, drainage, wastewater, and water distribution systems is being incorporated in a new standard called InfraGML which is supported by the OGC. Its focus is alignments/roads, survey, and land parcels and it synchronizes with the concurrent efforts by buildingSMART International in its development of infrastructure-based Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs), for example, for alignments, as well as with CityGML and TransXML. The first public draft of the OGC's proposed UML conceptual model for land parcels and the built environment was released for public comment at the beginning of the year.

BIM IFC and CityGML

An outstanding issue is the integration of BIM models into the Singapore city model.  A number of groups are working on a way of integrating CityGML and the BIM Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard.  An example is the Dutch 3D standard. 

Energy modeling for cities

The European SUNSHINE (Smart Urban Services for Higher Energy Efficiency) project has found a data model within the INSPIRE standard that is adequate for energy performance modeling for cities.  CityGML has strongly influenced the development of the INSPIRE BU model, both for 2D and for 3D profiles.  Many use cases that were considered for INSPIRE BU require a three-dimensional representation of buildings such as a building information model (BIM). Examples are noise emission simulation and mapping, solar radiation computation or the design of an infrastructure project. To allow for that, the building representation in Level of Detail (LoD1 - LoD4) of CityGML has been added to the INSPIRE BU model as a core 3D profile. For large scale energy performance at the urban level, the SUNSHINE team concluded that detailed interior elements of each building are not required.  It is possible to work at a simple Level of Detail 3 (LOD3) and just include elements like roofs, envelope walls, and windows.

GeoWave aims at linking popular geospatial tools to "big data" technology

A very exciting project has been proposed at LocationTech (it's in the Project Proposal Phase as defined in the Eclipse Development Process).  Simply put, GeoWave intends to do for "big data" databases (initially Apache Accumulo) what PostGIS does for SQL databases (PostgreSQL).  GeoWave is open source software (licensed under Apache 2.0) that adds support for geographic objects, multi-dimensional indexing and geospatial operators to Apache Accumulo.  

NoSQL databases

To deal with data volumes that are too large for traditional SQL databases, beginning in 2004 Google developed "BigTable" which is a compressed, high performance, and proprietary data storage system built on the Google File System that is used by a number of Google applications including Google Maps.  Apache Accumulo is a distributed database that is based on Google's BigTable design and is built on top of Apache Hadoop and other Apache projects.  For putting geospatial data into a key/value store like Accumulo the key concept is that of the "geospatial hash" which converts a 2D, 3D or 4D coordinate such as a lon and lat, lon, lat and elevation or a lon, lat, elevation, and time to an integer index, such as a quadtree or R-Tree index, that can be used to order and rapidly retrieve spatial data.  GeoWave means that you can manage massive amounts of geoinformation in key/value databases such as Accumulo and take advantage of programs such as MapReduce which Accumulo uses for distributed processing.

Connecting Accumulo to GeoServer, GeoTools, and PDAL

In addition GeoWave includes a GeoServer plugin to enable geospatial data in Accumulo to be shared and visualized via GeoServer OGC standard web services. It provides plugins to connect the popular geospatial toolset GeoTools and the point cloud library PDAL to an Accumulo based data store. The PDAL plugin makes it possible to interact with point cloud data in Accumulo through the PDAL library.
 
The GeoWave project Work plans to extend the same geospatial capabilities to other distributed key-value stores in addtition to Accumulo.  The next data store will be HBase.  It also will support other geospatial frameworks in addition to GeoTools/GeoServer.  Mapnik is the next geospatial framework targeted for GeoWave support.  GeoWave says it is very interested in GeoGig and support for this geospatial data versioning library is currently on their backlog.  GeoGig takes the concepts used in distributed version control such as Git and applies them to versioned spatial data.

Background
 
GeoWave was developed at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in collaboration with RadiantBlue Technologies and Booz Allen Hamilton.  The NGA released GeoWave under an open source license in June, 2014. The primary goal of GeoWave is to bridge the gap between well-known geospatial projects such as GeoTools and distributed databases.

I blogged previously about GeoMesa, the first LocationTech project that aims at providing a foundation for storing, querying, and transforming spatio-temporal data in Accumulo.  It implements interfaces that enable Geoserver and other Geotools projects to use Accumulo as a data store.

Deriving engineering and O&M cost information from "scan to BIM" models

At last year's Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) BIM National Conference 2014, RICS sponsored a BIM Vendor Showcase in which a BIM model derived from scanning the RICS headquarters building in Parliament Sq in London was provided to vendors who were asked to estimate quantities including gross internal floor space. For comparison RICS staff also measured the building internal spaces with tape measures.

The results were surprising. For example, the gross internal floor space was measured by tape measure to be 4,736 sq-m.  The vendors' estimates derived from the BIM model ranged widely from 3,474 to 4,781 sq-m.   The variances in other measurements derived from the BIM model among the vendors were also quite wide.

At this year's RICS BIM Conference, a similar experiment was tried, but the question was not focused just on measuring dimensions of interior spaced but also on estimating maintenance costs based on the BIM model.  The vendors were asked to consider just one floor. In addition to the 3D BIM model derived from scanning the building, the following information was provided to all the vendors

• BIM model and coloured plan of the floor
• A condition survey/schedule
• BCIS typical component life expectancies
• BCIS building maintenance price book

Scenario

Eight vendors were invited to participate in this year's exercise. Four vendors took up the challenge. The vendors were asked to respond to the following scenario:

A company has a floor in a building (the RICS HQ building) and wants to understand the expected life cycle costs over the next 10, 20, and 30 years. 

Floor space measurement

On the basic measurement of floor space the different vendors were in much better agreement with the tape measure result than last year.  In fact one vendor came up with exactly the result that RICS measured.  (The others didn't include some cupboard space in the floor space calculation.)

Lifecycle cost estimates

All the vendors used different software packages to estimate maintenance costs 10, 20, and 30 years into the future.  Each vendor had a different focus, for example, feasibilty, detailed estimating, or facilities management, and the results reflected the different objectives.  

At the RICS BIM event three of the vendors described the workflow they followed to estimate the lifecycle costs.  One example of a workflow was

• Import BIM data in IFC format into a BIM 3D model viewer
• Select elements and export data as COBie Excel file
• Create survey template with full element and room list using NRM1/3 (see below) elemental structure
• Import BCIS component life expectancies and building maintenance prices (see below)
• Import BIM data
• Perform condition survey of RICS HQ
• Upload data to cloud to run 10, 20, and 30 year lifecycle plan
• Report results as net present values

The lifecycle costs estimated by the different vendors varied widely, for example, from £ 90,000 to £ 220,000 for the 30 year lifecycle cost.  The variance reflects the different assumptions that were made by each vendor about the condition of the assets (remaining life), the condition they needed to be in to operate efficiently, how much they could be stretched before failing, which maintenance activities to be included/excluded in the life cycle costing, the cost of maintenance activities, and different discount rates and other financial parameters.

Conclusion

RICS' conclusions are that the software vendors are accelerating rapidly in this field.  They were pleased that RICS standards such as NRM are being embedded in the software.  From a data perspective, BIM quality is key and a content plan defining what information is required is essential.  Most importantly, it was emphasized that you can't plan on simply loading the data and pushing the big red button.  It is necessary to carefully check everything and this requires an experienced professional.

Glossary

BCIS (Building Cost Information Service) provides benchmarking data covering cleaning, energy consumption and administrative costs. It is used for early life cycle cost estimating and the development of life cycle cost plans by facilities managers and surveyors who specialize in facilities management, maintenance and operating costs.

NRM (New Rules of Measurement) are published by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). They provide a standard set of measurement rules for estimating, cost planning, procurement and whole-life costing for construction projects.  They are the "bible" for what is in the UK called quantity surveying (QS).  It is comprised of three volumes NRM1: Order of cost estimating and cost planning for capital building works, NRM2: Detailed measurement for building works, and NRM 3: Order of cost estimating and cost planning for building maintenance works. Together this suite provides a cradle-to-grave guide for cost estimating, works procurement and post-construction procurement.

New standards for building documentation including 3D imaging and Level of Accuracy released

In 2012 the U.S. Institute of Building Documentation (USIBD) was founded to bring together the various stakeholder groups (owner/operators, architects, engineers, contractors, surveyors, brokers, and others) to promote and facilitate building documentation as a distinct industry; establishing standards, guidelines and best practices to foster excellence in the productivity, quality and safety of the documentation process. 

The USIBD has released three quarterly Cornerstone Reports based on surveys of building documentation professionals to help profile the industry.  One of the questions asked of the building documentation professionals responding to the first survey is how frequently 3D imaging is used in the building documentation industry.  Three-quarters of respondents said their clients used 3D imaging in just 25 percent of their projects.  Nearly 75 percent of respondents said they expect client use of 3D imaging to increase by 50 percent in the next year.

The USIBD is developing a library of building documentation standards utilizing existing standards and augmenting them where necessary.  It is also developing specifications intended to address all stakeholders’ and project needs.  The USIBD is simplifying the process of qualifying professionals by providing the key factors and their significance to properly qualify building documentation professionals.  It is also developing Request for Proposal (RFP)  Templates generated by industry professionals to ensure that owners requests are clearly and professionally communicated.

The USIBD has just released four building documentation standards/specifications.

3D Imaging Specification

Provides guidance and protections to those individuals or organizations soliciting proposals from providers offering professional building documentation services for 3D imaging, typically laser scanning.

Level Of Accuracy (LOA) Specification

A reference or guideline that enables professionals in the Architectural, Engineering, Construction, Owner (AECO) Industry to specify, with a high level of clarity, the accuracy and means by which to represent and document existing conditions.  This is related to Level of Development (LoD).

Request for Qualifications (RFQ)

Provides guidance and protections to those individuals or organizations wishing to qualify providers offering professional building documentation services

Request For Proposal (RFP)

Provides performance based criteria to ensure the client (Architect, Engineer, etc.) obtains the desired deliverables

These documents/specifications are available to download for free through March 16, 2015.

Integrating BIM and GIS for full lifecycle civil construction projects

Construction is being transformed.  I've blogged about the startling (at least to traditional construction contractors) vision of the future of highway construction of the Chief of Surveys at the Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) in which BIM for Infrastructure and geospatial play a central role. 

At the first GeoBIM conference in Amsterdam, Jothijs van Gaalen gave some real world examples of highway construction transformation including GIS+BIM integration including using laser scanning/LiDAR for reality capture at the beginning of a design/construction project. 

Jothijs is Manager of the (civil) BIM Programme and Head of the Structural Modelling department at the Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult.  The Royal BAM Group nv is a large infrastructure engineering consulting firm with 23,500 employees operating in over 40 countries, primarily in Europe.  Its goal is to be among the top 10 companies in its market segment.  To achieve this is has targetted supply chain integration focused on a sustainable built environment.  One of the key areas of integration in GIS+BIM.  BAM has BIM/GIS modelling departments in Amsterdam, The Hague, Gouda, Singapore, and Jakarta.

Full lifecycle construction projects

BAM's motivation for investing in BIM+GIS are market developments especially more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project.  The other major drivers are internal business needs especially being able to control safety, quality, costs, planning, and sustainability through the lifetime of a project. 

A project at BAM starts with 2D geographic data that is visualized through a GIS web portal. The web portal gives everyone on the team an early perspective on the project site including underground utilities and aboveground structures before design begins.  During the tender process the geospatial data is combined with 3D data including 3D representations of nearby natural and man-made features as well as proposed designs to create a 3D environment for assessing alternative designs.  The 3D environment improves collaboration among the team members as well as enabling better communication with the client through 3D visualization of proposed designs. After award, the first step is conducting LiDAR scans of the site/proposed route.  At completion of construction, the data collected during design and construction is migrated to an integrated GIS + asset management system system to support maintenance activities. 

Level of development (LoD) is critical for full lifecycle construction projects at BAM because it specifies the level of detail for both graphical and non-graphical data that is required at each phase of a project's lifetime; roughly tender (LOD100), design (LOD200), construction (LOD300), and  operate and maintain (LOD400). 

Design, Build, Finance and Maintain project

The N33 highway project in the Netherlands is an example of a Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) project. In a DBFM contract, the contractor is not only fully responsible for designing and building the project, but also handles the administration and all maintenance. In a DBFM contract the government buys a service: the provision of an available national road.  BAM is responsible for design and construction,  which occurred during 2012 – 2014, and for 20 years of maintenance.

During design and construction BAM used a BIM for Infrastructure process based around a geospatially-enabled database.  At completion of construction, the data collected during design and construction was migrated to an integrated GIS + Maximo system designed to support maintenance activities during the 20 year period that BAM is responsible for highway maintenance.  Maximo is IBM's enterprise asset management (EAM) software product.

Best practices

Jothijs discussed some of the best practices that BAM has developed during the N33 and other projects.  These include integrated BIM + GIS with time (4D), and financial (5D), training of multi-disciplinary teams, standardizing LoD for graphical and non-graphical data and involving suppliers as early as possible in the project. 

The one that really struck me as potentially transformational is BAM's recommendation to collect accurate geometrical data (reality capture) at the beginning of the project, before design, using laser scanning.  Since laser scanning is not normally part of a surveyor's skill set, I was interested in who was responsible for conducting  the scans and how BAM's surveyors were involved.  Jothijs said that BAM's survey group performed the laser scanning as well as traditional surveys.  This sounds like the result of another of BAM's best practices, training multi-disciplinary teams.

Long range UAV with 5-12 hours flight time

In the last year or so I have come across a number of UAVs at the various conferences I have attended.  They range from hexacopters to fixed wing aircraft, but all of them suffer from a serious constraint - limited flight time, typically 40-50 minutes maximum.  Under adverse weather conditions flight time is less than that.  This limits the usefulness of these UAVs for long range missions, for example transmission line monitoring, which typically involves LiDAR mounted on a helicopter and is expensive.

I have just come across a UAV that promises much longer flight times.  The Silent Falcon is a solar/electric, all composite, modular small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS) designed for commercial, civil, public safety and Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) applications. It has a solar/electric propulsion system and is made from carbon fiber composite materials similar to many of today's large scale commercial aircraft.  It has three interchangeable wing configurations for different flight profiles.  It is silent, claiming to be undetectable at less than 200’ above ground (AGL).

It claims it is the first sUAS capable of meeting long endurance mission profiles typical of many commercial, civil, public safety, and other operations. Its daytime endurance is estimated to be 5 to 12 hours depending on wing configuration, weather, and flight profile. Night-time endurance is estimated at 3 to 5 hours.  For example, equipped with LiDAR this could be used for transmission line monitoring for vegetation management at a much lower cost than a manned helicopter.

It uses thin film photo voltaic (TFPV) solar energy collection and Lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries for energy storage.  It has an HD electro-optical camera and an infrared sensor as standard vision sensors, but also supports medium-wavelength infrared (MWIR), Hyperspectral Imager, and LIDAR devices.

Thanks to Kim Tofin for pointing me to this.

Mobile scanning interiors of buildings with automatic feature extraction for energy performance modeling

At the SPAR International conference Avideh Zakhor from the University of California Berkeley gave an enthralling presentation about her research on capturing optical and thermal point clouds of the insides of buildings using a portable backpack containing a collection of sensors.   Her team has also developed analytical software tools for generating floor plans, distinguishing rooms, identifying staircases, texture mapping surfaces, identifying windows, finding heat sources such as computers and human occupants, identifying lights, and even estimating plug load lower consumption - all automatically. The software her team has developed can generate input in the form of an IDF file for the Department of Energy's EnergyPlus energy performance analysis program. Avideh said that soon it will also be able to generate a gbXML file, which can be consumed by almost all building energy performance analysis software.

Man portable system

 

The "man portable system" her team has developed is a 32 pound backback with a collection of sensors.  There are sensors for accurately tracking the six degrees of spatial freedom which determine the location and orientation of the backpack in addition to sensors for recording optical and thermal point clouds. The operator walks through the building going into all rooms, halls, stairwells and other human accessible spaces. With the backback this is a much faster process than capturing indoor spaces with static laser scanners. For example, Avideh's team was able to scan Union Station in Washington DC in a matter of hours. A comparable static scan takes days.

 

Automated feature extraction

 

The resulting georeferenced data is then offloaded from the backpack and analyzed to generate different 3D data products including optical and thermal 3D point clouds, a colourized 3D point cloud, surface texture map,  and triangulated mesh surfaces.  Two different triangulated surfaces are generated for different applications - a very detailed surface and a much simpler model of spaces and walls. Using these data products the software automates feature extraction. It can distinguish  windows, staircases, and individual rooms and generate a floorplan.  Surface textures can be added to create a 3D photorealtistic rendering.  By analyzing both the optical and thermal point clouds the software tools can identify heat sources including computers and human occupants and can even identify lights and estimate power plug loads.

 

Building energy performance modeling

 

Usi‎ng the results of the automated feature extraction the software tools can be used to generate the input required for a building energy performance audit. Currently the tools are able to generate input in the form of an IDF file for the Department of Energy's Energyplus whole building energy simulation program.   Avideh said that soon it will be possible to generate an gbXML file, which can be consumed by most building energy performance analysis applications including IESVE and Green Building Studio.  This clearly has the potential to convert what is now a slow, manual, expensive process into a fast, repeatable, affordable process.

Bridging the generation gap for spatially-enabled asset management

I've blogged many times about the aging workforce challenge facing many industries.  At the SPAR International conference Wayne Rodieck of Anadarko Petroleum outlined what this means to the oil and gas industry and how he is uing IT to bridge the generation gap.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is projecting that by 2020 the U.S. will surpas Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer.  US oil and gas production, driven by technologies that are unlocking light tight oil and shale  gas resources, is rising dramatically.  Since 2008 the U.S. oil and gas industry has increased production by 25%.  This expansion has created 1.7 milllion new jobs. 

Most of these have been filled by young workers with no or little experience in oil and gas, but better acquainted with IT technology than the experienced workers who are on the verge of retirement.  As with other industries oil and gas is faced with the challenge of knowledge transfer to enable younger workers to be as productive as possible and to avoid a massive decline in productivity as the older generation retires.

Dr Apostol Panayotov of UC Denver described an online spatially-enabled asset information system at Anadarko that is designed to be accessible to both generations.  It provides a web-based user interface designed to serve up information about equipment on oil and gas facility sites including visual photographs, facility attributes and accurate geolocation.  It is based around point clouds captured by scanning valves, pumping stations, and other oil and gas pipeline infrastructure, but it hides the point cloud behind an intuituve user interface that relies on smart digital photographs of faciltiies.  Clicking on a particular piece of equipment such as a valve, tank, or catwalk in a digital photograph links the user to information about that picece of equipment including geolocation and dimensions, information that is derived from a point cloud.

Wayne described a simple use case which explains what he sees as the critical advantage of this approach.  There is an emergency and at 2:30 am he has to send a young, inexperienced worker out to a site where there are a 120 valves to turn off one of them.  He feels confident that by providing the young worker access to this online system which includes accurate geolocaton that he go to the right site and turn off the right valve.  Equally important the intuitive photograph-based used interface will not put off the experienced workers who are less comfortable with IT systems.