Between the Poles

Digitalizing the as-builting process essential for accurate underground utility mapping

Over the past decades electric, gas, water, and telecom utilities have poured millions into digitalizing the graphic design/work management and GIS/records management processes. But in spite of this the decades-old as-builting process remains marred by manual paper-based processes that have ramifications for industry and society in general. As-builting is characterized by inefficiency that causes critical processes such as outage restoration to require more time than they should and low data quality which leads to incomplete, out of date and inaccurate underground utility records that are responsible for frequent construction delays, injuries and fatalities for workers and the public, and a drag of billions of dollars on national economies.

Dated, paper-based as-builting workflow

One of the biggest and most persistent problems for almost all utilities is the use of paper in the construction as-builting process.  It is a challenging problem that has been with us for decades.  The first post of this blog in February, 2006 discussed this problem and in some respects the as-builting workflow has not changed that much since then.  Over the past decades utilities have spent millions of dollars digitalizing design (CAD) and records management (GIS), but the gap between them has remained filled with paper. The schematic shows a typical design, construction to GIS workflow that's in place at most utilities today. Design is done using a graphic work design system (CAD) in the office that is integrated with a work management system. A paper job packet is sent to the construction crew in the field who attempt to follow the design drawing. More frequently when contractors take the design drawings out into the field, they often find that obstacles, such as existing utilities or other infrastructure even old tram lines or sewer lines, force them to make changes.  After completion of construction paper as-builts are prepared that make their way back to the office to be entered manually into the records system typically a GIS. If the construction crew has had to make some changes, these are supposed to be redlined on the design drawing, but all too frequently the crew simply hit the easy button and check the box that says, "We built it exactly as you designed it." The reality is that 90% of designs change in the field and the changes are rarely recorded. This is a major source of data quality issues and is the chief reason for the general unreliability of utility GIS records. Unreliable underground records lead to construction delays, budget overruns, injuries and even fatalities for workers and the public. 

The as-built workflow is also fraught with inefficiencies because many of the processes are manual.  The result is massive mapping backlogs. Backlogs of 30, 60, 90 days from construction complete to being entered in the GIS are common. The result is that the utility GIS is always out of date and critical processes such as outage resolution require more time than they should. 

If we are to address these issues it is imperative that we improve the way buried assets are designed, constructed, recorded, and managed.

Grid modernization is driving change

As a result of being asked to do many more things than in the past, the grid is being transformed from a centralized to a distributed model. For electric utilities, utility digital transformation is already driven by increased demand for distributed energy resources (DER) such as solar, wind and other renewable technologies. This creates a requirement for an advanced distribution management system (ADMS) which is the intelligence that supports the new distributed smart grid model. These developments are being accelerated due to COVID-19 and the requirement for a more touchless environment for utilities. The bottom line is that for these advanced solutions to provide full value a reliable digital twin of what is out in the field is essential, and right now for most utilities that remains a challenge.

Grid hardening to increase resilience is another major initiative that is contributing to transforming the grid.  When a utility experiences a major storm, flood, catastrophic wildfires, or other natural disaster it has to change its infrastructure plans.  It may have to move overhead wires underground, move transformers out of flood zones, or ameliorate the risk to substations.  The sheer glut of aging infrastructure replacement programs is also increasing pressure on utilities and contributing to a significant increase in construction activity. Grid transformation on this scale with the sheer volume of new construction that it required is forcing utilities to find ways improve productivity by managing construction data from source to consumer digitally.

As-builting remains a persistent problem

However, a major source of construction inefficiency remains. Why, after decades of growing awareness of the inefficiency and data quality issues associated with the traditional as-builting workflow, are construction as-builts still recorded on paper ? First of all, there's resistance to change. Utility construction is managed using a variety of manual, paper-based processes that have been in place for decades. Secondly, there's the aging construction workforce that has always relied on legacy processes and has not seen reason to change. Another problem is that well-established enterprise systems such as asset management and GIS don't provide the comprehensive solution that construction crews need to digitalize the full process. Those systems are designed to support long cycle construction projects which typically require a month of planning and may not be completed for six, nine, or twelve months. 

An important factor that makes this problem so persistent and difficult to resolve is the many personas involved. The as-builting workflow is tasked with taking highly technical engineering output from the designers, translating it into instructions that a construction crew can use to safely build the job to code and to standard, then asking a field engineer to draw up the as-builts, and converting those paper drawings into geospatial data that a GIS technician can use to update the utility GIS. Technically this is a complex process that involves distinctly different personas that work in different teams with different technical vocabularies, different training, different software systems, and who are measured by different goals and performance indicators. It is further exacerbated by a lack of clarity as to who owns the as-builting process, engineering, construction, or records/GIS. The designer may point to the contractor as the owner. The contractor might think the GIS technical team is responsible and records/GIS group may think that the designer owns it. Often the real answer is that no one owns as-builting and that is the operative reason the problem has been so persistent for decades.

Digitalizing the as-builting workflow

To improve the efficiency and data quality of the as-builting process digital tools are required to help utilities bridge the gap between the design and the system of record. The key technologies making this possible are mobile applications and mobile devices, cloud technology, and the availability of economical high accuracy GPS. To be successful the tools need to be adapted to the different personas. For the construction crew end user persona a mobile first philosophy is essential to enable real-time data capture in the field. This requires easy to use mobile apps supplemented by high accuracy GNSS and devices such as bar code scanners.  Together these make possible the efficient capture of survey grade data and associated metadata greatly enhancing the speed, accuracy and fidelity of the data feeding the utility systems. In addition a digital data stream makes it possible to update the system of record more rapidly.  This result is the records/GIS to become more effective in producing reliable as-built records that locate and construction crews can rely on.  For utilities that have adopted this approach, enabling field crews to digitally capture construction data is now a best practice.

Example: Digitalizing the mapping of underground duct banks

As a real world example a contractor serving some of the largest utilities in the West Coast of the U.S. was faced with new requirements for the construction project they were working on for a utility customer.  They were now required to capture GPS locations real-time during construction.  Precision was required to be two-tenths of a foot (2.4 inches) or better and location data points were to be collected every 25 feet for linear assets. The contractor had not had to meet requirements like this before on a major project. The scale of this project made the new requirements even more challenging; 35 sites throughout the Central Valley of California, 35,000 feet of trenching, auger bores under highways and railroads, and many primary enclosures.

Fortunately the contractor had had experience with digital construction processes on smaller projects. Based on their previous experience, they were convinced that a member of their own construction crew already on site could capture the location data with the required precision. Having in-house capability for capturing survey grade construction data would allow them to deliver the data without having to have a survey crew on-site or managing outside survey crews. The benefits they hoped to realize were cost savings associated with not having to hire an outside survey crew and related intangibles such as not having to coordinate schedules for survey crews and holding up construction while waiting for survey crews to arrive. However, they were concerned that the the additional training and work load required to capture location data could potentially disrupt their construction crews' schedules.

Key project achievements of digital construction workflow

The implementation of the digital workflow by construction crews actually proceeded rapidly. Crews were capturing survey grade GPS data within days.  Over a period of six months using the solution at 23 active construction sites, over 16,000 feet of buried linear assets, including duct banks and tracer wires, were mapped and some 5,000 supporting photos along the way were captured. The median GPS accuracy of the data captured by their construction crews was 0.14 feet, a remarkable achievement that exceeded the project precision requirement.  Their customer even requested them to go back to pothole and capture accurate locations for trenches that had already been covered over before they began using the new digital process. The many photos that were collected along the way and geotagged to specific locations provided a valuable record of everything that was done in the field for future reference.

Benefits of digital construction workflow

One of the important results of the project was that their initial concern that digital capture in the field by construction crews might disrupt the crews' daily routines never became a problem. Construction crews were able to collect as-built data from open trenches using mobile devices with high accuracy GPS without disrupting their normal processes or impacting their schedules. An important cost benefit was that they didn't have to employ and coordinate survey crews.  Instead of calling in a survey crew they were able to employ one of their own crew members who was already on site to capture survey grade location data. This resulted in an estimated project time savings of around 20%.

An important advantage of the the digital construction process they used enabled them to spot when crew members' shots did not achieve the required project precision. The ability to identify and flag data that exceeded the 0.2 foot accuracy requirement and needed to be repeated was an important factor in achieving the overall project precision goal. Flagging low precision data also avoided the costly process of having to send a vac truck out after the trench was filled to do potholing and retaking shots. Another benefit was automated close out enabling them to receive automated data exports without having to do any paperwork.

The major achievements of digitialization were that survey grade as-builts could be captured in near real time with no disruption to construction crews' schedules, the utility GIS rapidly updated and able to provide up to date, high accuracy underground utility records and all of this at lower cost. Overall the project realized an estimated cost savings of around 50% mainly because fewer man hours were required.

This post is based on Danny Petrecca's talk at the Canadian Underground Forum (CUF). You can listen to all the talks at CUF on the GeoIgnite CUF Youtube channel.

Mobile + cloud solutions are revolutionizing the capture and sharing of reliable underground infrastructure location data

A major gap in the construction process is the unavailability of reliable information about the location of underground utilities for civil engineering construction projects such as highways, railways and pipelines. All states and provinces in North America have one call legislation designed to reduce underground utility damage during construction, but statistics show that in North America damage to underground utilities is increasing. Japan and Heathrow International Airport are two examples where comprehensive approaches to reducing damage to underground infrastructure have been implemented and statistics have shown that damage has been dramatically reduced.  In 2013 France implemented the DT DICT system which statistics reveal is reducing underground damage by 2% per year.

Mapping underground infrastructure is benefiting from accelerating innovations in technology in detecting, locating, capturing and sharing subsurface utility location data. Experience has shown that enabling these technical advances to permeate and transform business practices in the entire construction industry requires government intervention. Recently several jurisdictions around the world have undertaken initiatives to collect and integrate underground infrastructure location data and make it available to all construction stakeholders. The key stakeholders in public civil engineering construction are government transportation agencies, utility and telecom network owners and operators, professional locators, engineering consultants and construction contractors. Among the leaders in this effort are the Vault system in Scotland, the National Underground Asset Registry (NUAR) project in the UK, Singapore's Digital Underground initiative, and the State of Colorado. While the UK and Singapore are in the initial stages of implementation, Scotland implemented the Vault system beginning in 2012.

Colorado has recently enacted legislation and is in the process of implementing regulations and systems that are transforming the collection, integration and sharing of underground infrastructure location data for public civil engineering projects in the public right of way with the objective of creating a digital twin of the infrastructure in Colorado's right of way. A key component of this effort is a mobile + cloud solution that enables the capture and sharing of underground location data among all construction stakeholders owning facilities or working in the public right of way..

The challenge: incomplete, inaccurate and out of date underground location data

To provide context for understanding the challenge of reliable information about the location of underground utilities, this image shows what you would see if you removed all the pavement on a downtown New York street. Removing pavement on Bay Street in Toronto or Howe Street in Vancouver would reveal the same spaghetti bowl of utilities and pipelines that have been haphazardly slapped into the ground over many decades.

Utilities and telecoms have attempted to capture the location of this infrastructure in the form of records, originally paper and now often managed in a GIS.  Records are generated by a flawed process based on paper as-builts. The original planning and design documents for underground utilities are paper drawings created with CAD software. But where utilities actually go into the ground and where they were planned to go in the ground are often very different.  First of all, the designers planning routes for new utility installations don't have access to reliable location data for existing utility infrastructure.  When the contractors take the design drawings out into the field, they often find that obstacles, such as existing utilities or other infrastructure like old tram lines or sewer lines that force them to trench in another location.  Furthermore contractors get paid based on how rapidly they get the new facilities installed so there is a tendency to take the path of least resistance. 

Records are being frequently out of date as a result of the paper-based process.  Design drawings created using AutoCAD or Microstation are used to generate paper drawings universally used by contractors in the field. Ultimately these documents are returned as as-builts to the utility's records group who digitize hem into the utility's GIS. Utilities track their as-built backlog, the time it takes from the time an as-built is returned from the field to the time it appears in the utility GIS.  As-built backlogs run typically into months, although a year in not unheard of.

Another important source of uncertainty arises from the locates performed in response to one call or 811 information requests.  It is industry knowledge that at best ground markings are accurate to within one meter. In addition, especially with dense utility infrastructure, there is uncertainty in determining which utility has actually been identified. This uncertainty in one call locates has motivated many construction and engineering companies, who realizing that they can't rely on those markings because they are the ones that actually take on the risk and the liability, reduce risk by contracting vacuum and hydrovacuum daylighting services.   Daylighting involves safe potholing to verify the location of the utilities identified by the one call locators.  (To give a perspective of the size of this market, Badger Daylighting in Canada has over a thousand hydrovac trucks.) When the daylighters are unable to find the utility that was marked by one call locators, they will dig additional holes to try to identify the actual location of the utility facilities. As an example, for the I-70 project in Denver, which is an 11 miles of highway expansion, over 33,000 holes have been dug and that number continues to grow as the project progresses.  Daylighting is expensive, time consuming, exposes workers to risk of injury and disrupts traffic.

Mobile + cloud solution enables reliable underground location data

Mobile + cloud solutions have been developed that replaces these dated, archaic and slow paper-based workflows with near real time digital processes that result in complete, accurate and up to date records of the location of underground utility infrastructure.  Mobile + cloud solutions have been adopted by a variety of stakeholders in the construction industry including engineering firms, contractors, professional locators, and government transportation agencies.  But the value of a mobile + cloud solution is greatly enhanced when it is mandated for all construction stakeholders involved in public construction projects.

The mobile + cloud workflow is simple; capture the location data in the field with a handheld app which also collects metadata about the detection and the high accuracy GPS/GNSS devices used in the  field, upload the data to the cloud, post-process the data and in a few seconds actionable location information is available to excavators and contractors, project management and other stakeholders.

For a standard locate operation using an electromagnetic (EM) device, the EM locate tool is paired to a consumer mobile device such as a mobile phone or tablet, that's running a mobile app. In addition a precision GPS/GNSS receiver is also paired to the app to provide survey-grade, centimeter location accuracy. As the locate tool is used to identify underground utility facilities the location and metadata information is collected and pushed up to the cloud application which is running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or another cloud processing service. Post processing using proprietary algorithms transform the raw data into actionable information and the results are available within seconds to all project stakeholders.  The metadata comprises what is referred to as the pedigree, representing all of the information that is typically recorded in a surveyors notebook.

Metadata

Metadata is a critical part of the data that is captured in real-time in the field. For example, the manufacturer and model of EM locate device, estimated depth and vertical precision, the manufacturer and model of GPS/GNSS receiver, how many satellites are in view, the original NMEA strings, date, time, XY location and estimated precision and the metadata that is used to estimate vertical and horizontal precision. Comprehensive metadata includes when the data was captures, the equipment used, who captured it, the quality level, the geographic projection and coordinate system, horizontal and vertical precision, and so on. Metadata is essential because it provides information required to assess the reliability of the data about each underground facility.

Integration with GIS and other systems

Another critical feature of a mobile + cloud solution is the ability to integrate with existing systems of record, such as a utility GIS, that are used by utility owner/operators, pipeline owner or other stakeholders. This makes it possible to stream data from the field to utility and telecom owners and operators enabling them to compare the actual locations to identify discrepancies in their records. With a click of a button they can import the data of where the utility line actually is to update their records.

Adopted by a variety of construction stakeholders

Mobile + cloud solutions have been adopted by different construction stakeholders. In Colorado Kiewit, one of the largest infrastructure construction company in North America has adopted the solution. KCI, which is one of the largest subsurface utility engineering firms in the US was an early adopter of the software and more recently T2, a major subsurface utility engineering firm based in Canada has also adopted the solution. Zayo, one of the top fiber optic companies in North America with operations in the US and Canada, is an early adopter of the software. Because the sector is extremely competitive, telecoms are extremely concerned about data protection, the ability to control who has access to fibre network data, at what location, at what time and for how long. is an essential capability for telecom operators. Blood Hound, a subsidiary of United States Infrastructure Corporation which is the largest utility locate company in North America, has adopted the software to digitally capture accurate locations of buried utilities and pipelines and then share that information with the utility owner.

Municipalities

Many municipalities have made a big investment already in a system of record, often a GIS, to geospatially manage their assets. Recently some are finding that their existing systems are slow and cumbersome and are adopting a mobile + cloud solution as a primary system of record (SOR) to manage their critical infrastructure. A key requirement is seamless integration with GISs and other systems making it possible to aggregate and present all the data that is needed in the field, by management and other stakeholders.  Furthermore in Colorado the state-wide CDOT mandate enables CDOT data to be shared with municipalities.

State-wide mandate by CDOT enhances value

While individual stakeholders have realized significant value from adopting a mobile + cloud solution (for example, one of the quantified benefits that Kiewit has realized as a result is a reduction in utility strikes on major projects by upwards of 90%, which translates into cost savings in the millions of dollars in direct costs), the value of the solution has been dramatically enhanced by Colorado DoT mandating a single mobile + cloud solution for the entire state.  Everyone who owns, operates, maintains or installs utility or pipeline equipment in the state right of way by law is required to use the same software software which enables contractors, locators, subsurface utility engineering firms, utilities and telecoms, and government transportation authorities to share their data. CDOT has acquired a number of mobile licences that enables it to provide handheld apps to all its construction contractors so they are able to view CDOT data in the field and also add to the data as new infrastructure is installed or existing infrastructure is relocated in preparation for a road or highway project.  Furthermore CDOT now requires that over 150 utility companies and more than 1,000 utility installation stakeholders use the same solution to capture and record the location of underground utilities.

The provisions of the Colorado Revised Statutes has resulted in the reliability of the data contained in the CDOT database being much higher than is typically found in utility or telecom records. The high accuracy underground utility data comes from two sources, both mandated by the recent Colorado Revised Statutes; subsurface utility engineering surveys (SUE) and as-builts submitted for newly installed utility and telecom infrastructure. In addition, in some parts of Colorado, for example, the western slope, CDOT is inventorying existing underground infrastructure in the public right of way to support future civil engineering projects. Ultimately it is to be expected that the CDOT data will comprise a complete, up to date, high accuracy map of underground assets in the public right of way in Colorado. Such a map will provide immeasurable benefits to everyone involved in construction in the public right of way.

This post is based on Page Tucker's keynote at the Canadian Underground Forum (CUF). You can listen to all the talks at CUF on the GeoIgnite CUF Youtube channel.

Colorado leads in mandating subsurface utility engineering (SUE) surveys for public civil engineering projects

A major gap in the construction process is the unavailability of reliable information about the location of underground utilities during the design stage of civil engineering construction projects such as highways and pipelines. All states and provinces in North America have one call legislation designed to reduce underground utility damage during actual excavation, but the legislation does not provide for making underground records available to inform the design phase of construction projects. Colorado is the first state/provincial jurisdiction in North America and one of the first in the world to mandate a subsurface utility engineering survey (SUE) at the pre-construction stage. At the Canadian Underground Forum in April, Rob Martindale, Utilities Program Manager at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) and a Professional Land Surveyor, described the process by which SUE surveys became law in Colorado.

Several jurisdictions around the world have undertaken initiatives to integrate underground infrastructure location data and make it available to all stakeholders. Among the leaders in this effort are the National Underground Asset Registry (NUAR) project in the UK, Singapore's Digital Underground initiative, and the State of Colorado. While the UK and Singapore are in the initial stages of implementation, Colorado has already enacted and implemented legislation and regulations which are transforming underground infrastructure location data for public civil engineering projects across the state.

Mapping underground infrastructure is benefiting from accelerating innovations in technology in detecting, locating, capturing and sharing subsurface utility location data. Experience has shown that enabling these technical advances to permeate and transform business practices in the entire construction industry requires government intervention. The key stakeholders in civil engineering construction are government transportation agencies, utility regulatory agencies, utility and telecom network owners and operators, civil engineering consultants and construction contractors.

Rob Martindale is responsible for improving CDOT's subsurface utility mapping program and utility data management systems. He has been involved from the beginning in the legislative and regulatory processes that are transforming underground infrastructure data in Colorado and is able to provide an insider's perspective on how this process unfolded in Colorado.

As anyone who is involved in civil construction knows, the historical problem with locating underground infrastructure is that utility company records (aka network documentation) are inaccurate, old or outdated, lost, or simply just never existed to begin with. The records that do exist are often inconsistent and the quality of the data is unknown. Records are kept in different data models and formats, typically as CAD drawings, GIS files, paper copies, and PDFs. Some drawings are schematics rather than records of actual utility location. Virtually all of the data is 2D so depth is unknown. Another complicating problem is that in general each utility uses a different base map making it difficult to integrate data from different utilities on a single map. These issues make compiling a reliable map of underground infrastructure in preparation for a civil construction project a challenge. The result is that underground utilities are ignored until excavation begins. As a consequence according to the Federal Highway Administratiion (FHWA) underground utilities are the biggest cause of delays in highway construction projects.

Recognizing the risks associated with underground utilities, CDOT could see that one way to reduce risk was by enabling more reliable and efficient subsurface utility mapping. Since the state is the legal custodian of the public right of way, it had the power to enforce regulations for utility and telecoms with network facilities in the right of way. To CDOT having more reliable location data and more comprehensive attribute data about each utility such as size of pipes and cables and types of material would make for more efficient and productive coordination with utility owners. To achieve this CDOT's vision was a single platform where all underground location and attribute data would be accessible to all stakeholders working in Colorado on current and future civil construction projects.

New legislation revising Colorado's one call statute

In 2015 the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) conducted an assessment of the Colorado one call system that resulted in a report that identified the lack of an enforcement mechanism as a major impediment to effective prevention of damage to underground infrastructure in the Colorado one call legislation. The PHMSA review had implications in a number of areas including future Federal funding. Then in April 2017, there was a gas explosion in Firestone, Colorado that resulted in fatalities and attracted a high degree of public attention. Recognition that that the incident could have been prevented further prioritized the issue for the Colorado legislature. The result was growing pressure from many construction stakeholders including the Colorado Contractors Association, the American Council of Engineering, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and CDOT which ultimately attracted the attention of politicians. The initiative was taken up and made a top bipartisan priority by two representatives in the Colorado legislature, Senator Ray Scott, Republican, and Senator Kerry Donovan, Democrat. In 2018 they co-sponsored a bill to revise Colorado's one call statute. The revised statute was signed by the Governor on May 25^th and became law in August, 2018.

The legislation included several important provisions. First and foremost the new law required subsurface utility engineering (SUE) surveys on most public civil engineering projects. It requires the project owner, CDOT or another agency, to notify the Colorado one call center for all projects that require a SUE survey. Furthermore after being notified by the one call center utility owners are required to provide their best available records of their infrastructure in the project area within a 10 business days. The project owner is then required to conduct a SUE survey at their own expense and provide the results showing the location of all underground infrastructure and assigned the ASCE 38 quality level to CDOT. Importantly, the SUE document must be stamped (signed) by a PLS or PE to ensure accountability. Standard SUE practice is to achieve at least ASCE Quality Level B for all underground utilities. In the case of conflicts with a new gravity-fed systems it is expected that test holes will be dug to locate and identify conflicts with existing utilities. Furthermore Colorado became an ASCE 38 state. The law requires ASCE 38 to be used on SUE surveys. Currently that means 38-02, but when the requirement will be ASCE 38-21 when that version is released.

For excavation the Colorado 811 notification process was also modified. It allows the utilities two days to visit the site and mark utilities on the ground before excavation begins.  In addition the new law mandated that all newly installed utilities must be electronically locatable.

Another important provision of the new law was the creation of a one call enforcement mechanism. This was in response to the PHMSA assessment of of Colorado's original one call legislation. The new legislation created an Underground Damage Prevention Safety Commission with the power to levy penalties on utilities that were non-compliant with Colorado's one call requirements. For example, if a utility company fails to provide its best available records within 10 business days, the commission is empowered to levy a fine of up to $75,000.

Integrating SUE into the construction lifecyle

Beginning in August 2018, CDOT adopted a five stage utility project delivery process that includes SUE activities and utility coordination processes.

In the planning stage a design scoping review (DSR) determines whether the project requires a SUE survey. There are four criteria for a project to require a SUE survey; it must be a public project, it must be primarily a horizontal project, not a vertical project such as a building, excavation must exceed two feet in depth and the site must encompass a contiguous 1000 square feet, and the project must be designed by a professional engineer. Based on these criteria more than 95% of CDOT projects meet the requirement for a mandatory SUE survey. In addition at this stage Colorado one call (CO 811) must be notified and utility owners are required to provide their best available records within 10 days. Also in the planning stage a SUE vendor i selected.

In the 0 - 30 % design stage an initial SUE review is conducted to identify all underground infrastructure to ASCE Quality Level D, C, or B. At this stage the SUE survey involves records research, geophysical investigation, professional engineering judgment, knowledge of construction practices and utility design principles all of which are used to determine the quality level to be assigned to each segment of existing utility information.

During the 30 - 90% design stage the goal is to complete the necessary remote detection and test holing to achieve QL B or A for all underground assets at the site. A technical innovation that CDOT has adopted is a mobile and cloud-based hybrid GIS/surveying system for recording underground utility location and other data. The data collected by the SUE vendor is entered into this system which allows the SUE data to be shared among all stakeholders and to be available throughout the entire construction lifecycle.

As an example a project might start with a design in Microstation. The initial SUE data is used to identify potential conflicts each of which is flagged with QL D, C, or B to show the assessed reliability of the location data. Using existing utility data compiled by the initial SUE survey makes it possible to to avoid potential utility conflicts at a very early stage.  This helps avoid costly or time consuming utility relocations. It also makes it possible to identify critical infrastructure and conflicts that may require test holing.  During the 30 - 90% design stage the SUE vendor attempts using remote sensing technology and test holing to achieve QL B or A all underground assets at the site. At this advanced design stage detailed conflicts in 3D can be identified to enable remedial action to be undertaken.  SUE data can be pushed back to the CAD environment for redesign or for utility relocations. SUE data is also made available on CDOT's mobile app for contractors to use in the field to resolve discrepancies in utility surface markings from locating activities resulting from one call notification. The handheld app also makes it possible for contractors to record new test holing that they have conducted and to document utilities exposed during excavation activities.

Colorado has become a model for jurisdictions who have recognized the human and economic cost of inaccurate, out of date and missing data about the location of underground infrastructure. Advances in technology are enabling a revolution in how we detect, capture and share reliable information about the location of underground infrastructure, but, as Colorado is demonstrating, transforming business practices in the construction industry as a whole requires legislation and regulation.

This post is based on Rob Martindale's talk at the Canadian Underground Forum. You can listen to Rob's talk on the GeoIgnite CUF Youtube channel. 

Innovative solution efficiently captures accurate underground utility as-builts during construction

Most of underground utility damage during construction is attributable to incomplete, inaccurate and out of date records and network documentation. This data is the result of an inefficient, error-prone, and paper-based information flow from engineering, through construction crews, and resulting in "as-builts" of uncertain quality which eventually form the utility's repository of record, typically in a GIS.  Recently a mobile solution has been developed that ensures that centimetre-level accurate as-builts are efficiently captured in the field in real-time. By digitalizing and automating the collection and validation of all construction data, accurate and up-to-date as-builts become the new normal.  Already used by over half of the 20 largest energy companies in the US, the Locusview system is being extended to support natural gas utilities, electric power utilities and telecom.

Background

Without accurate maps of underground infrastructure, every construction project has the potential to become an expensive disaster site. In the U.S. there are between 400,000 and 800,000 incidents of underground utility damage every year. Every year there are injuries and fatalities attributable to underground utility damage during construction. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) missing or inaccurate location information about underground utilities is a major source of highway construction project delays. The drag on the U.S. economy resulting from underground utility damage is estimated to be at least $50 billion annually.

Inefficient, error prone construction information flow

90% of underground utility damage during construction is attributable to incomplete, inaccurate and out of date records maintained by utilities and telecoms as well as data format issues including paper and digital ink (pdf).  The reason for unreliable records of network infrastructure can be found in an information flow that is found at every utility and telecom.

The design-build-maintain information flow begins with an engineer and drafter producing a design, typically a CAD drawing, which is printed for construction contractors to use in the field in installing new underground network infrastructure. Typically the design is based solely on above-ground surveys because information about existing underground infrastructure is unreliable or missing. The construction contractor may attempt to follow the paper design drawing, but for a variety of reasons what actually ends up in the ground differs from what was designed.  The design drawing, nominally an "as-built" but typically an “as-designed”, is then returned to the records management/network documentation group who enter it into the utility's GIS where it forms the permanent record of the utility or telecom's network infrastructure. This process is slow and error-prone and backlogs of as-builts waiting to be entered into the GIS stretch into months. The result is that utility and telecom GIS data is often inaccurate, out-of-date and incomplete.

Accurate as-builts are becoming mandatory

To address the problem of unreliable as-builts and the associated human and economic consequences several governments have enacted legislation and regulations requiring the submission of accurate as-builts.  Montana has recently revised its statutes governing the installation of utilities on state highway right-of-ways.  An updated Administrative Rule mandates that as part of a new permitting process accurate electronic as-builts must be submitted to the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) upon completion of construction.  To ensure accuracy the regulations require that the as-builts be stamped by a licensed professional engineer (PE) or professional land surveyor (PLS). 

In 2017 the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) released a standard and specifications for the procedure and practice of utility surveying in Singapore.  The standard specifies that after installing utilities and prior to filling the trenches an as-built survey must be performed by a registered surveyor to capture the location of the utilities with horizontal accuracy of ±100mm and vertical accuracy of ±100mm.  In addition the standard specifically identifies the survey equipment to be used; total station, GNSS Real Time Kinematic (RTK), or 3D laser scanning.  This standard is not mandated, but provides a baseline to be incorporated in all government construction contracts.

In response to the requirement for accurate as-builts, the challenge for contractors is to capture accurate as-builts without adding to field crew workload and without impact to project schedules.

Digitalizing the construction information flow

Locusview was founded in 2014 as a spin-out of the US Gas Technology Institute (GTI) with industry funding to develop next-generation digital construction technology for the energy and telecom industry

Locusview has adopted a paperless, digital approach based on a mobile app that makes field crews the nexus for efficiently capturing accurate as-built information.  The user-friendly mobile application makes it easy and even attractive for crews in the field to move from a manual, paper-based process to one in which all construction data is digitally captured and validated in real-time during construction.  In addition to ensuring that as-builts accurately represent what was actually built in the field, this approach reduces time and costs in field data collection, reduces the time required to prepare as-builts for submission, and ensures that data gets into the GIS faster.

During construction field crews use the Locusview Mobile app with high accuracy GPS and barcode scanners to capture as-builts, track material usage, capture photos and support other field operations such as joints, splices and welds. But the app doesn’t just capture the asset information, it also validates that the information is complete and accurate according to the company’s data requirements and construction standards. Locusview captures material data faster and more accurately with automated feature creation and attribute generation using barcode scanning. In the case of gas utilities information on all welds and joints needs to be recorded because if done incorrectly welds and joints can lead to leaks and other problems. Locusview helps ensure that these processes are carried out correctly by capturing real-time pictures and by validating welder qualifications (OQ).

High accuracy GPS is implemented in several ways.  RTK base stations can be used for real-time high accuracy GPS. In GPS denied areas a laser range finder can be deployed. Alternatively control points can be used to ensure accurate georeferencing.

Back in the office the Locusview Web application enables visibility into the real-time status of projects, making it easier to assess progress and to project revenue streams. It also provides for data validation with automated warnings and notifications of violations; review and approve pre-configured check lists; exporting data to GIS, ERP and asset management applications; reports generation and project closeout.

Benefits

There are several critically important benefits that Locusview provides.  Most critically it provides for real-time reality capture, ensuring construction quality by enabling survey-grade accurate location, attributes and material data to be recorded by construction crews as new infrastructure is installed.  This ensures that as-builts are accurate and material usage is verified and traceable. It reduces the time to prepare as-builts for submission and speeds up the process of getting the as-built information into the utility's GIS by up to 70%, which is also crucial for emergency repairs. Having full visibility over the project’s status information in real-time using Locusview’s web tool makes it easier to track project progress and to project revenue streams. The field visibility also enables supervising the work remotely, which is helpful during Covid-19 times. In addition, time and costs are reduced for capturing and managing construction data by eliminating manual paper-based processes.

Just as importantly Locusview ensures that field construction information is captured efficiently. Maintaining a survey team on site to survey newly installed pipes and cables can be prohibitively expensive especially for smaller projects.  In actual projects it has been found that Locusview can reduce surveying costs by 50%.

In summary, utilities and telecoms use the technology to build a high-quality digital twin, to support asset management strategies and to ensure regulatory compliance.

Electric power case study

VPI, a Charge company, specializes in the construction of utility-grade electric power distribution infrastructure. During a recent major project involving 35,000 feet of open trenches and 35 construction sites for a large electric power utility in California the as-built requirements changed for both above and below-ground distribution infrastructure. Among the new requirements: as-built locations had to be accurate to ± 0.2 feet (± 6 cm).   One of VPI's major concerns was the cost of keeping a professional survey crew on-site at all times to capture the location of infrastructure to survey accuracy.

VPI looked for an alternative that would lower costs and provide the flexibility of not having to coordinate with outside survey crews.  VPI's main concerns were how to efficiently meet the high accuracy requirements, how to optimize the training and education of field staff, and avoiding adding to the work load of their field crews.

Locusview implemented their solution for VPI to meet the new high-accuracy GPS as-builting requirement that included the mobile app, web app and additional RTK base station coverage. The mobile app was found to be easy-to-use after only four hours of training for field crews. Most importantly using the mobile app instead of a traditional survey crew did not add to field crew workload and was able to be implemented without impact to schedule. Remarkably for this type of project the process only required 10 days from first contact to beginning data collection. 

It enabled 16,362 feet of linear electric power assets to be mapped with a median accuracy ± 0.14 feet (4 cm).  Nearly 5,000 photos were captured for future reference. With the web application crew foremen were able to monitor construction progress in real-time to ensure data collection was complete and met their requirements before back filling trenches.  Avoiding the need to coordinate with outside survey crews resulted in a time savings of ~20% in project management for closeouts and reduced time in the field. Overall VPI realized cost savings of ~50% from reduced man-hours.

Conclusion

This remarkable application provides a solution to the decade-old challenge of efficiently capturing high accuracy as-builts in real-time and eliminating the problem of as-built backlogs.  Gas is the most dangerous underground utility and it is not surprising that the development of the Locusview solution was fostered and heavily adopted by the gas distribution industry.  Jurisdictions are beginning to require high accuracy as-builts from energy companies, electric power utilities, water utilities and telecom as a basis for a digital twin. To capture accurate as-builts efficiently is the challenge that Locusview addresses. The VPI case study shows that Locusview is able to provide efficient solutions for capturing accurate as-builts without adding to field crew workload and without impact to project schedules. This solution offers important benefits for any field constructed linear asset.

Centimetre-accurate as-builts efficiently captured with a smartphone

Without accurate maps of underground infrastructure, every construction project has the potential to become a disaster site. Incidents of underground utility damage are more frequent than many people realize. In the U.S. there are between 400,000 and 800,000 incidents every year. Every year there are injuries and fatalities attributable to hitting underground infrastructure during excavations. Inaccurate and missing information about underground infrastructure is also responsible for construction project schedule and budget overruns. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) missing or inaccurate location information about underground utilities is a major source of highway construction project delays. The drag on the U.S. economy resulting from underground utility damage is estimated at $50 to $100 billion annually.

90% of underground utility damage during construction is attributable to (1) incomplete, inaccurate and out of date records maintained by utilities and telecoms and (2) data format issues including paper, digital ink (pdf) and raster (imagery) records. As one customer said, existing records are typically 15-30% off the mark. Another contractor reported that records are not updated after relocation of assets. The result of these and other issues is that excavators are often working blindly.

AVUS is a recent startup that has been incubated by Vinci Group , a French construction company with annual revenue of €48.1 billion. In 2019 Vinci ran 290 000 construction worksites. AVUS is a service company providing services for capturing accurate as-builts and visualizing underground infrastructure.   Recently I had a chance to chat with Sebastien Magat, the entrepreneur behind AVUS.

As-built service

AVUS have developed a reality capture solution that allows the creation of as-builts accurate to ± 5 centimetres from a video taken with an Android smartphone. Currently in use at 30 construction sites, the workflow is very simple; open the AVUS app on a smartphone, connect to a local RTK base station or use known control points, enter project and site information, use the app to create a video by walking along the open trench after installation of the utility, upload the video to the AVUS cloud site where a point cloud is created, georeferenced and scaled using RTK or known or recorded ground control points, and receive the as-built in the form of point cloud (.las), orthophoto, and CAD drawing (.dwg). A similar process can be used with utilities exposed during construction to amend and correct existing records.

The process of generating a DWG file from the point cloud is currently a manual process, but with the rapid advances in feature extraction technology, aided by machine learning algorithms and the compilation of training data by EPRI and others, in the future this process is expected to be increasingly automated.

A benefit of the AVUS as-built services is that it provides reliable records of underground infrastructure certified to ±5 centimetres horizontally and vertically. For new infrastructure this provides a reliable record of what was installed in the ground, in other words, "as-constructed" instead of "as-designed".  For existing infrastructure this enables discrepancies and omissions to be reported back to asset owners. The as-built records are PAS 256 compliant and integrate with existing utility GIS databases.

Another important benefit of the AVUS as-built service is that it does not add significantly to construction costs. It is very efficient compared to the time required to call a surveyor to the site - the AVUS video recording takes less time than it would take for the surveyor to drive to the site. Furthermore, the video approach works in every weather condition, even at night in artificial lighting. This enables the construction crew to continue with their work, instead of having to wait for the surveyor to get to the site and conduct the survey.

Augmented reality

AVUS compiles existing 2D and 3D records and site investigation results into a 3D model that can be visualized in augmented reality on a handheld.  An Android app has been developed that uses Google AR Core to project highly accurate holograms on a smartphone. Accurate positioning is achieved by connecting to a local RTK base station or by calibrating to known features in the field of view.

The app is easy to implement and use and it integrates with existing utility GIS databases. The benefits of this AR approach is that increases productivity by enabling more rapid location of underground networks and results in reduced risk of underground utility damage.

AVUS provides an important service that captures the location of underground infrastructure efficiently, improves the quality of location data, and makes the data easily accessible to engineers and contractors in an augmented reality view in the field.

UK pilots demonstrate secure platform for sharing information about underground utility networks

In the 2017 autumn budget the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced an important initiative to increase the value of the contribution of spatial data to the UK economy. The Geospatial Commission was created in the centre of government, as an independent, expert committee. It aims to unlock the significant economic opportunities offered by geospatial data and to reinforce the UK’s geospatial expertise on the global stage.

To provide strategic oversight of the geospatial landscape in the UK, the Commission provided a  £5 million fund to support collaborative data projects across 6 Partner Bodies - Ordnance Survey, HM Land Registry, British Geological Survey, Valuation Office Agency, UK Hydrographic Office and Coal Authority who between them hold most of the governments high quality geospatial data.

Among the first projects initiated by the Geospatial Commission was a process leading to the creation of a National Underground Assets Register (NUAR).  The objective of NUAR was to create a secure means to share information about underground infrastructure mainly among local government organizations, and utility and telecom network operators.  The register is intended to show where electricity and telecom cables, and gas and water pipes are buried and is targeted on several use cases: safe digging to avoid utility strikes, on-site construction efficiency, site planning, data exchange, and improved coordination. The project started with £3.9 million allocated for two pilot projects split between Central London and North East of England.

The system for sharing underground data for both pilots was provisioned by OS on an in-country cloud platform. It is built on an OGC standard data model and supports OGC standards such as WFS for data exchange which enables most GIS products such as QGIS and ArcGIS to access it. A lot of the effort was devoted to security, privacy and protection of competitive information. For each network operator there is a terms and conditions document that defines the legal requirements for how that operator's data can be used, Queries are limited to 10,000 square meters for field user access and there are other limits to prevent multiple queries aimed at viewing an entire network. System users are network operators, local government, and contractors working for either of these.

Using an earlier prototype version of this platform in 2018 OS and Northumbrian Water undertook to create a map of underground infrastructure in Newcastle on Tyne.  The objective was to compile in collaboration with utilities, local authorities and partners a combined infrastructure map for small sample areas including water, wastewater, gas, electricity, telecoms and other underground services. The project benefited from a spirit of cooperation - all major local utilities and telecoms in Newcastle were happy to share their data and had vector data available to contribute.  The result was a database where each utility was steward of its own data which was shared through a hub. Interoperability based on OGC standards was demonstrated with three different GIS systems consuming the combined underground data through APIs. The data could be ingested into GIS systems with internet access, regardless of format and provisioned to both field engineers and planners.    As part of this experiment in creating a shared map of underground utilities, contractors were brought in to actually dig a hole so that participants could experience first hand what is involved in excavating to determine the location of buried utility assets.  OS created a web interface to enable excavation teams in the field to access the data relevant to them via a mobile device.  By the end of the week it was possible to demonstrate a working system that allowed excavators to query the map of underground utilities and use this information during excavation and construction.  At the innovation festival a data sharing agreement was developed that all parties agreed to – Northumbrian Water, Northern Gas Networks, Northern Power Grid, Openreach, Durham County Council, Newcastle and Sunderland City Councils, Cranfield Soil and Agrifood Institute, British Geological Survey and Ordnance Survey.

Following on the innovation festival the participants formed the North East Underground Infrastructure Hub (NEUIHub) consortium in order to progress the creation of a ‘Common Infrastructure Map’ implementing a dataset that contains almost full water, gas, electricity and a great deal of telco data for the city of Sunderland.

The most recent implementation of the NUAR system was deployed in late 2019 in the North East of England and as part of the pilot in Central London. When I was in Newcastle for a meeting of the NUAR Advisory Group, we went out in the field with an iPad to compare the network information available on the NUAR pilot system with above-ground visible infrastructure, manhole and handhole covers with distinctive designs allowing the below-ground network to be identified.  While the quality of the data was what I expected from utility as-builts (PAS 128 quality level D), the remarkable part of the experience was being able to see all the underground networks, water, wastewater, electric power, gas, and telecom, in the query area together on the screen - a very rare experience anywhere in the world.

The Central London pilot is covering the area of six boroughs in Central London. While the vast majority of relevant data has already been vectorized in the Northeast of England, this is not necessarily the case in London.The Greater London Authority (GLA) will provide funding to local authorities to locate data and upgrade its format for use within the pilot platform. To enable comparison of vector and raster data, for three of the boroughs all the data will be vectorized. For the remainder various formats including raster will be used.

There are two remarkable achievements of these pilots.  The first is a secure legal framework within which municipal government organizations and network operators are able to safely and securely share their data. When a user accesses data of a network operator, there is a downloadable document associated with the data that defines the terms and conditions under which the data can be used. 

The other remarkable element is that it makes it very easy to provide information about  errors that are observed by stakeholders in the field, for example, if a contractor performing road work for a town council exposes pipes or cables that are not located where utility as-builts indicate they should be. In the NUAR pilot system these are called observations and are represented by green triangles associated with the incorrectly located features. Observations enable a worker who notices an error in the field - a wrong location, incorrect type of equipment, or other problem - to enter corrected information about the location, type of equipment, and other information from a mobile device.

Damage to underground utilities represents a significant risk to the public and is a major cause of construction project delays and budget overruns. The NUAR project represents an important step forward in enabling the sharing of information about the location and other information about underground infrastructure that will contribute to reducing the risk of damage to underground utilities during construction.

Tracking a construction project in real-time with smartphones

Many see handheld scanning as revolutionizing the construction sector.  The Dot Product handheld scanner and Faro Freestyle introduced in 2013 were among the first multi-sensor devices (IR laser and photo cameras) targeted at professionals, especially in the engineering and construction sector (mm accuracy at 2 m). They employed laser scanning technology similar to the Microsoft Kinetic (2010). For rapid site documentation, Matterport allows you to scan a floor of a building in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later have a fully-rendered 3D walk-through that can be accessed over the web.  It was originally targeted on the real estate sector but recently has been experiencing growing application in the construction industry. The Leica Geosystems BLK360 captures full-color panoramic images overlaid on a high accuracy point cloud (mm accuracy at 60 m). It weighs only about a kilogram. One-button operation means this is almost a consumer device- anyone who can operate an iPad can use the imaging laser scanner. But it is a professional device - it collects 360,000 points per second and has a range of 60 meters with 4 mm accuracy - with a very low but still professional price. Recently I came across a startup called HoloBuilder that only requires a consumer grade 360° camera and a smart phone app to document a construction project working with uploaded floor plans and walking through a job site placing the camera and tripod in the middle of each room to take a series of 360° photos. 

I just came across a product focussed on construction that lowers the bar still further.  Now ordinary smart phones can be used to capture the status of construction work at a very granular level in real-time.  A mobile+cloud application CTBIM created by BuilDATAnalytics enables each subcontractor on a project to document each step of their work with little additional effort.

Design plans are preloaded with all room and interior space locations. All assets associated with each room are in the CTBIM system organized according ot the scope of each trade's contract. For installing doors or windows for example, the height, width, material, partition, thickness, hardware and other specifications are catalogued in CTBIM for for all doors and windows associated with each room. This information is available on a subcontractors smart phone whether there is connectivity or not.

For example, a subcontractor responsible for installing door or window assemblies can simply click on the task on a smart phone and take a picture. This provides a detailed time-stamped (GPS stamped for civil projects) record of each subcontractors progress which can be used for a variety of purposes.  For example, it makes it possible to track construction progress at a very granular level, identify productivity issues that threaten the schedule, and provide documentation that could protect subcontractors if facilities are damaged later in the project.  It also means that the owner or an owner's agent such as a facilities manager can see the design page where the specific window or door assembly appears, the picture of what the door or window looked like at the time of installation, the  manufacturer specification sheet, operations and maintenance manuals, and other documentation relating to each building element. All of this information is recorded in the CTBIM database during construction and for the lifetime of the building or infrastructure.

This enables CTBIM to follow construction progress in near real time with location-specific, real time photographic or videographic evidence of work completed, real-time calculations of percentage of work completed, real time calculations of percentage of budget dollars earned per contractor, real time update on the number of assets required for the project and the number of assets on hand, on demand reports of every asset installed in a structure, the dates of installation, and the ability to drill down to identify the person responsible for the installation activity, room by room comparison of how long a build or installation activity took to complete, and data that can be used use to advise owners of the number of crew members required to accelerate build activities to avoid schedule creep, among other things.  CTBIM is focussed on providing owners actionable insights into the activities of each field crew responsible for some aspect of the build.  Since virtually every subcontractor already has a handheld smartphone, the CTBIM application could dramatically impact subcontractor business processes - improve productivity, remove risk, and provide greater transparency, critical for an industry prone to litigation.

It is really incredible how quickly consumer technology such as Kinetic and mobile handheld devices equipped with sensors, cameras and apps are being adapted for the construction industry.  As earlier users of the Dot Product scanner at Bechtel forecasted, these devices are beginning to revolutionize many aspects of how we do construction.

AR enables better grid damage assessments and improves quality of utility GIS

Maintaining accurate, up-to-date GIS data has been a challenge for utility and communications firms for decades.  Inefficient CAD/GIS workflows result in utility GIS quality degrading with time.  Now with business drivers such as implementing a smart grid, determining service availability and other applications making GIS quality a top priority at an increasing number of utilities and communications firms, new technical solutions are being applied to implement new business processes that raise the quality of utility GIS data over time.  These include CAD/GIS integration; integrated engineering design, GIS and enterprise services; extensive geospatial open source libraries  for viewing, editing and analyzing geospatial and other data; and reality capture often together with AI for inspections, distribution and transmission vegetation management, asset inventories and creating network data models. Another example of a technical advance that can contribute to improving GIS quality over time is a recent proof of concept by Duke Energy, Verizon and EPRI in which augmented reality (AR) was applied to improve the reliability of damage assessments after major events.  While successful in making damage assessments more reliable, Duke found an unexpected result that AR also improved the locational accuracy and description of assets in the GIS.

Broken business processes degrades GIS data quality

 Over the years the lack of CAD/GIS interoperability has cost communications and utility companies hundreds of millions of dollars trying to cleanup their GIS data and streamline their CAD+GIS workflows.  For many utilities and communications firms traditional GIS/CAD business processes, which have been the standard approach for maintaining utility GIS for the past few decades, has simply not been able to maintain cost-effective, real-time, high quality asset location and associated data.  Instead GIS data quality tends to degrade with time.

Challenge: improving the reliability of damage assessments

At Distributech 2019 Aleksandar Vukojevic of Duke Energy together with Paul Giers Duke Energy, Micah Tinklepaugh EPRI, Norm McCollough EPRI, and John Simmins (now Associate Provost for Research and Economic Development at Alfred University) reported on a proof of concept at Duke Energy the primary objective of which was to apply AR to improving the reliability and trust-worthiness of damage assessments after major disasters, but found an unexpected benefit in contributing to improving GIS data quality.

The objectives of the trial were to investigate the application of AR to reduce errors in identifying and characterizing missing and damaged equipment and as a result improve trust in the assessments by the work crews assigned to carry out the repairs required to restore power. It was envisaged that AR could improve damage assessments by visualizing before-storm images over post-storm damage thereby simplifying identifying missing or damaged assets. Currently field technicians visit the area of the outage and use paper and pencil to assess and record damage. Some of the challenges associated with this process is that field technicians, especially less younger, less experienced ones or office staff seconded to the field, may not be knowledgeable about the secondary power grid and in assessing damage to it. The result is missed and incorrect identification of missing or damages equipment. In addition paper processes are slow and error prone making ordering the required replacement equipment a major source of delay in restorating power.  The result is a lack of trust in damage assessments by field crews.

Proof of concept: Applying AR to improve reliability of damage assessments

The trial involved a safety helmet mounted RealWear HMT-1 Android computer with an eye-level display and microphone. It incorporated a GPS so that location was recorded automatically. The HMT-1 was connected via WiFi to router in a truck that connected via a Verizon wide area network to a cloud server.  The field engineer views the "before picture" based on the location data and is guided to align the high resolution, stabilized HMT-1 camera to match the same view to capture a corresponding "after picture". Voice commands and voice responses to damage assessment questions presented in the application are utilized for a fully hands-free user interface. As the engineer performs the work, data is immediately sent to the back office for evaluation and action. The images and data are used to create a list of equipment and inventory required to restore missing and damaged equipment.  The trial did not involve an actual outage but simulated a major outage.  17 different sites were involved in the exercise. 

Results of the proof of concept

Early results indicated that nearly 100% accuracy rate was achieved in damage assessments using AR.  This represents a 50 % improvement over the existing, paper-based process. This resulted in much greater trust by work crews in the damage assessments.  In addition financial benefits were estimated to be significant. The first 12 hours response spent manually recording and transferring assessment reports was sped up dramatically. It was estimated that for an outage affecting 250,000 customers over a four day period, the time to assess and restore power could be reduced by 12 hours with a cost savings of over $ 8 million. One of the big advantages is that training only took 10 minutes even for a worker with no damage assessment experience.  Assessments were delivered to the back office in near real-time, much faster than for paper reports and eliminating the "middle man" who transcribed paper reports into a computer based system reduced the number of errors.

Side benefit of using AR: Improved GIS data quality

While Duke assessed the proof-of-concept to be successful for damage assessment, they also reported an unexpected but important result of the proof of concept.  The process using AR for identifying assets helped improve the quality of utility GIS data compared to the existing paper-based process that could actually result in degrading the quality of the GIS.

In conclusion Duke was extremely happy with the proof of concept. Achieving 100% accuracy even for inexperienced assessors impressed the Duke Energy team and created much greater trust by the work crews in the assessment reports. But AR had an important side benefit - Duke found that using AR to accurately locate and identify assets had the potential to contribute to improving the reliability of asset data stored in the GIS.  This is another example of the application of technology which change business processes and result in improving the quality of GIS data over time.

Bringing reliable near real-time GIS within reach of every utility

Workflows for ensuring utility GIS quality are fundamentally broken and have been for decades.  Integrating CAD and GIS into an efficient workflow has been a challenge and it has simply not been a priority in the utility industry and in some parts of the communications sector to ensure real-time, high quality asset GIS data. Recently business drivers for high quality GIS data such as implementing a smart grid, estimating service availability and other applications have made GIS quality a top priority.  And now non-traditional geospatial companies are offering geospatial-based technologies that are revolutionizing the capture and maintenance of GIS information about utility and communications assets that can provide a foundation for the real-time network digital twin that is essential in the era of the smart grid and our increasing dependence on communications and utility networks. 

Broken business processes degrades GIS data quality

Maintaining accurate, up-to-date asset data has been a challenge for utility and communications firms for decades.  Over the years the lack of CAD/GIS interoperability has cost communications and utility companies hundreds of millions of dollars trying to cleanup their GIS data and streamline their CAD+GIS workflows.  One of the persistent themes from the very beginning of the Between The Poles was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data in a common workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).  Critical metrics for utility readiness for the smart grid is the as-built backlog, field update backlog and the location accuracy of the assets in the utility's GIS.  It is not uncommon for as-built backlogs to stretch into months even years, for updates from the field to take months to be entered into the records database if they are entered at all, and for the location of assets as recorded in the GIS to be city blocks from its actual location.   The challenge is to fashion workflows that include both engineering and geospatial data and applications into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance with feedback loops that ensures an accurate, near real-time GIS.  For many utilities and communications firms traditional GIS, which has been the standard platform for utility GIS for the past few decades, has simply not delivered cost-effective, real-time, high quality asset location and associated data.

A key workflow found at all utilities and communications firms is the field maintenance process.  In many utilities this is a broken feedback loop which results in the quality of GIS data degrading over time.  When a field crew performs maintenance on network infrastructure, which includes routine and emergency maintenance, or encounters equipment incorrectly located or described in the GIS, the changes or the corrections to the GIS data from the field need to get back into the GIS quickly.  Too frequently this is still a paper-based process typically involving redlining as-builts, which get to sent to records for updating in the GIS.  The backlog associated with field updates can stretch into months.  The slow turnaround of field updates discourage field staff from reporting corrections and changes further exacerbating the GIS quality problem.  The result of this and other broken workflows such as the as-buillt workflow is that not only is GIS data incomplete, inaccurate and out-of-date, but that its quality degrades with time.

Business drivers for accurate, real-time GIS

For communications companies a major driver for an accurate and up-to-date GIS is providing rapid availability of service estimates to prospective customers.  I remember a large U.S. telecom that because it could not rely on the information in its GIS had to resurvey all the locations of its fiber terminations in order to respond to potential ADSL customers indicating whether they were close enough to a fiber termination for the service.

For electric power utilities a powerful business driver that has emerged in the last few years is the smart grid.  Digitalizing the grid has made the role of geospatial data and technology strategic for utilities. As a Navigant Research report stated the smart grid is all about situation awareness and effective anticipation of and response to events that might disrupt the performance of the power grid. Since spatial data underlies everything an electric utility does, GIS is the only foundational view that can potentially link every operational activity of an electric utility including design and construction, asset management, workforce management, and outage management as well as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distribution management systems (DMSs), renewables, and strategy planning. As John Simmins of EPRI has reiterated on a number of occasions a prerequisite to implementing a smart grid is cleaning up GIS data and developing business processes (feedback processes) to ensure that it remains accurate and up-to-date.

Technology enablers: Open standards, open source geospatial and handhelds

Recent technical advances have made it possible to implement cost-efficient processes for ensuring that utility asset data including GIS data is accurate and up-to-date.  There are now many widely adopted geospatial standards; Simple Features for SQL, WMS, WFS, GML, KML, and InfraGML to name just a few from the OGC that were not available two decades ago.  Secondly, since the founding of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) in 2006 there has been rapid development of open source geospatial projects including PostGIS, GeoServer, MapServer, Leaflet and others.  This open source code-base has enabled entrepreneurs to rapidly develop low cost geospatial applications because the cost of maintaining most of the code is shared across a broad developer community.  Thirdly the advent of the handheld touch screen computer and phone provides a low cost universally accessible hardware platform for field staff to access geospatial and other information stored in a utility's databases.  With the appropriate software smart phones and tablets make it possible for field staff to see all of the information about an asset in the field at the touch of a finger.  For example, I blogged about how Duke Energy field staff are using an open source based mobile application which provides a single, common easy-to-use web tool for viewing geospatial asset data stored in GE Smallworld, ESRI ArcGIS, Intergraph GTechnology, spatialNET and Google Maps as well as non-GIS data in Maximo, SAP, three different outage management systems, four or five customer information systems, CAD drawings and photos and images.

Shifting the paradigm: GIS data maintenance from the field

The paradigm shift is empowering field staff to take responsibility for the quality of data in the utility GIS. Since they have direct knowledge about the location and condition of utility infrastructure, the key to revolutionizing data maintenance and enabling near real-time, accurate GIS and other data is "cutting out the middle man" and enabling field staff to maintain the utility GIS and other data in the field as they are working. Enabling field folks to do this without adding significantly to their workload (and over time reducing their workload as the quality of the GIS improves) requires a simple "touch and go" user interface which minimizes typing, responsive applications running on handhelds, and workflows that enable field staff to see their changes with a minimum delay measured in hours or days at the maxium.  Of course, operational data can be protected from problematic updates using data versioning technology (long transactions) which provides a rapid way for records folks to review and identify potentially problematic updates.

At Distributech 2019 a new entrant IQGeo emerged into the utility and communications space and announced an alternative to traditional GIS.  myWorld Capture is a mobile solution that prioritizes direct data maintenance from the field.  Building on an open source geospatial platform that supports data versioning and interfaces to legacy utility/communications GISs such as ArcGIS and Smallworld, myWorld provides tools that make it possible to develop and maintain a high quality near real-time GIS with the information that is required for a complete network asset data model including equipment location, descriptions, connectivity, condition, and status. 

The key to ensuring that the data is high quality and up-to-date is empowering field workers to make updates at the source as the work happens and to automate the data maintenance workflow as much as possible.  This approach can eliminate backlogs in field updates, encourage field staff to take responsibility for ensuring the quality of the utility GIS and enable an effective feedback loop that improves GIS data quality over time.   With the promise of near real-time updates directly from the field this approach provides a key foundation for the digital twin of the grid that integrates sensors reporting in real-time with simulation and analytics that makes it possible to create a accurate real-time situation assessment and to model the electrical state of the grid and possible future states based on reported or forecast outages and planned expansions and other changes to the electric network.

Operationalizing the new paradigm

How does this work in real world practice? I had a chance to chat with Dick Rohm, Director of Engineering at Cable One about how they are progressing toward their goal of no backlogs for field updates or for as-builts.  The business driver for this initiative, which they have been working on for the past several years, is service availability - being able to tell a customer immediately whether a fiber service is available at the customer's location or whether it will require an addition to the network.

Cable One provides commercial fiber services to businesses as well as cable services in 21 states, primarily in small cities and big towns.  Sales success requires being able to respond rapidly to potential customers requests for business fiber service, and say yes we already have the fiber capacity in your neighbourhood or no we have to build out a fiber line to support you.  Improving the quality of the data in their GIS is an important business driver for Cable One.  

By prioritizing as-built and update workflows Cable One has managed to ensure that as-builts and updates are in the GIS quickly, typically within 2-3 business days.  To achieve this, they first changed the as-built process, making the design process paperless about five years ago. Their engineering GIS allows engineers to use AutoCAD to design fiber and RF networks directly into GIS .  For construction, contractors are provided with AutoCAD drawings (DWG) on thumb drives and it is up to them if they wish to print them.  For small jobs, contractors can work completely electronically. For large jobs, contractors still use paper, but they print the DWG files themselves. Contractors must register with Cable One's Project Central which is used to track all projects. When paper as-builts are returned, they are spot-checked, and the GIS is updated based on any redlines. A project will not be closed out (and contractors paid) until redlines are in the GIS.  The GIS is used by Marketing and Sales as an added application to myWorld.

For updates from the field the initial idea was to use a web extension to their GIS, but they found that it was too cumbersome and slow.  It was replaced by myWorld on a handheld working with Google or Bing Maps which provided front end for viewing all engineering geospatial and associated data in the field. The myWorld solution only requires about an hour training time using a video. 

Based on the success of the myWorld implementation, user acceptance testing of myWorld Capture is currently underway. myWorld Capture enables field staff to update GIS and other data as they work.  Ease-of-use and rapid response are its key features. It makes it possible for field validators to do most of their work by tapping and drag and drop with very little typing.  Field engineering staff have to do more typing but even for them it is minimal.

The objective of the myWorld Capture implementation is 24-hour turnaround for updates from the field. It could even be less, but it is currently limited by the process of posting updates to the GIS and to the MyWorld database, which occur every night.  myWorld Capture will roll out to all field staff by July 1 of this year.
Dick Rohm emphasized that the key to making a transformative project, such as this at Cable One, successful is changing thought processes in the field. Data needs to be treated as just as important as physical assets.  When something changes or an error is found, the priority for field staff is to update it.  To encourage field staff to make changes in the GIS, tools need to be provided on handhelds that are fast and easy to use. Update processes must be fast so that their changes can be seen by field staff quickly in the GIS. Over time, field folks will increasingly rely on the GIS because they will see corrections that they make from the field appear in the database within 24 hours or sooner.  As data quality improves as a result of this feedback loop, field staff will find that they can rely on the GIS for locating and accessing up-to-date information about assets.

Conclusion

Prioritizing updates from the field to reduce the field update backlog to 24 hours or better together with an as-built backlog on the order of two to three days is a remarkable achievement.  It shows that with a business perspective that prioritizes a near real-time, reliable digital twin of utility and communications networks and geospatial technology supporting open standards and based on opensource and implemented for handhelds in the field, a cost-effective solution to the decades old GIS data quality challenge is within the grasp of any utility or communications firm.

Mobile app uses consumer 360° cameras for visual construction documentation

At this year's BIMForum in Las Vegas, I came across an intriguing new company in the construction technology space called HoloBuilder.  I had an opportunity to follow up with Harry Handorf to gain a better understanding of how their solution, a combination of an app for iOS and Android with cloud processing, makes it possible to use a consumer 360° camera such as Ricoh Theta cameras to quickly document progress on a construction site.

The handheld app is called JobWalk, which makes it possible after uploading a floor plan to walk through a job site placing the camera and tripod in the middle of each room to take a series of 360° photos.  After the photos are uploaded to the HoloBuilder cloud, virtual tours of the construction site are available to anyone with a web browser on their platform.  In the virtual walkthroughs, dimensions can be measured with 99% accuracy.  The only input data that is required to make this possible is the distance between the camera lens and the floor.  Plug-ins are available for Revit and Navisworks which make it possible to view as-designed BIM model renderings side-by-side with as-constructed.  It is also possible to time travel over the lifetime of a construction site comparing images taken at different times to track construction progress.

HoloBuilder introduced its technology to the broad market in 2014. In 2015 it won the grand prize at the RICOH THETA Developers Contest.  Since then it has focused its solution entirely on the construction market.  It even offers a solution for real-time construction monitoring.  Harry told me that it has many customers in the construction market including the likes of Skanska, McCarthy, AECOM, Hensel Phelps, Mortenson and others.

As a practical example of how HoloBuilder is used, Skanska is currently building a 185,000-sq. ft. hotel with a construction contract value of $52.3 million.  Skanska is using HoloBuilder on the project to document existing site conditions, share progress with stakeholders and make decisions requiring the agreement of remote stakeholders scattered around North America. One of the use cases where Skanska found a lot of value with HoloBuilder is capturing images as part of pre-pour inspections - necessary inspections that occur before pouring concrete.  The challenge is to document all the in-slab deck conditions prior to pouring in a very limited window of time.  Cables, heating and ventilation, plumbing and electrical, rebar, and other equipment need to be captured.  Skanska’s Project Engineers use HoloBuilder to take 360° photos in conjunction with the bi-monthly concrete pour cycle.  Each of the floors scheduled for concrete pouring is captured and uploaded during a one-hour site walk using the JobWalk app and a standard 360° camera. HoloBuilder estimates that one 360° photo contains approximately the same visual information as 11 single lens photos. The resulting HoloBuilder project provides information about the contents and layout of materials in the slab including mechanical, electrical and plumbing as well as the rebar size, spacing and number. The images also contain additional context related to site conditions, weather, and location where the 360° photos were captured. Skanska is able to share the site conditions with the architect and structural engineer as a supplement to the inspection.  With HoloBuilder, Skanska’s project team reduced photo documentation time by 50%.  It also was able to offer a valuable deliverable that could be shared with the owner, architect, facilities management team and other project stakeholders.

This is another example of how consumer devices are changing the construction industry. The number of startups like HoloBuilder, Dot Product, Enscape, Revizto, Fuzor, Skur, Cupix and others in the construction industry is increasing and many are using consumer technologies such as gaming engines (Unity, Unreal Engine). As new technology gains traction in a $10 trillion industry that has traditionally been ranked at the bottom of R&D spending and digitization, construction productivity will rise and infrastructure will become increasingly attractive to private investors who are expected to become the source of most of the money required to develop, renew and maintain our infrastructure for the next two decades.