Between the Poles

Mapping underground utilities prior to design helps highway construction project complete on schedule and below budget

The winner of the Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2019 Roads and Highways award is a remarkable project by Foth Infrastructure and Environment LLC for a $38.9 million highway revitalization project in Cedar Falls, Iowa. This project was unique for several reasons. First of all, before design, a 3D model of all underground infrastructure in the right-of-way was created. This was an important factor enabling the project to complete on-time and 3% under budget. Secondly, Foth projected that innovative design including roundabouts would save the community $32 million over 25 years by reducing the number of accidents, decreasing travel time, lowering fuel usage and emissions, increasing property values, and leading to greater economic growth.

University Avenue was an Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) six-lane, divided highway which the City of Cedar Falls took ownership of in 2014. Built over 60 years ago, the corridor carries 20,000 vehicles per day and was suffering from deteriorated pavement, a crash rate 20% above the state average, a lack of pedestrian and bicycle accommodations, a pedestrian death, and inefficient traffic operations.

Innovative, advanced traffic designs were developed; multi-lane roundabouts, a dogbone interchange, and complete streets – which allowed for a reduction of lanes that still decreased congestion and increased overall traffic flow. Technical innovations included use of drone and mobile scanning utilized for reality modelling, a building information (BIM) for creating 3D modles and fostering collaboration, and 3D visualization and traffic modelling for communicating alternative designs to stakeholders and public.

The project is one of the few of which I am aware in which a 3D model of underground utilities was developed before the start of the design phase. This enabled the detection of 200 utility conflicts during the design phase avoiding utility conflicts during construction and was the primary reason that the project completed on schedule and 3% under bid saving the City $700,000.

The project is also unique in that the design and build contractor estimated the benefits of the proposed innovative design using roundabouts over the 25 year lifetime.  It was projected that the community would recognize $32 million of benefits from fewer accidents, faster travel times, less gas consumption and associated emissions, growing property values, and increasing economic growth.

From a public safety perspective, Foth estimated an 89% reduction in personal injury accidents. As owner of the highway, the City is projected to realize $27 million in benefits from economic growth, corridor improvements, avoided traffic signal maintenance, and reduced lighting costs. Reality modeling including mapping underground utilities prior to design,  innovative highway design, and digital design technology based on BIM saved $521 thousand in project costs by eliminating utility conflicts and the resulting change orders, enhanced public engagement, and design acceleration.

Remarkably, despite facing aggressive schedules, vast information coordination, complex utility coordination, intense public involvement, and a very tight design schedule involving public participation, Foth was able to deliver the project on time and below budget.

Toward automating scan-to-BIM for brownfield substations

With about 55,000 transmission substations in the U.S. and the average age of the transformers in these substations over 40 years old, many substations are going to be refurbished, retrofitted, extended or upgraded. Utilities are opting to create digital twins of their existing substations as part of this process to enable maintenance and upgrading activities to be performed more efficiently. For older substations records may consist in outdated 2D paper drawings or documents may be missing altogether.  New digital scanning technology together with machine learning is making it possible to semi-automate the process of creating intelligent BIM models from point clouds derived from laser scanning or photography.

Companies are recognizing the benefits of an integrated geospatial and building information modeling (BIM) approach to design and construction. I blogged about the winner of the Year in Infrastructure 2019 award who applied BIM processes and reality modeling on a brownfield substation expansion project. The integrated approach enabled the organization to cut design time, minimize site visits, reduce land requirement and material waste, and, most importantly, eliminate change orders during construction.

Now reality capture and deep learning have been incorporated in a substation design product to semi-automate the scan-to-BIM process for brownfield substations.

primtech is a CAD-based design tool for high voltage substations.  An important recent enhancement Optical Symbol Recognition (OSR) allows point clouds from laser scanning or photography to be imported and then to apply machine learning to semi-automate the process of creating an intelligent BIM model. 

The software includes an extensive library, which contains more than four thousand intelligent 2D and 3D electrical devices from different manufacturers, steel structures, foundations, and wires and tubes.  The library has been growing for over 15 years and includes new equipment and elements as well as for legacy assets.  Each symbol (device, steel or foundation, etc.) has a specific geometric signature in the database in addition to meta data, file links, connection points and defined object behaviors. Together these comprise smart objects that enables objects in point clouds to be recognized and converted into an intelligent substation information model. The resulting intelligent model provides the basis for the calculations required in the substation engineering process.

The OSR process consists of two phases; first conductors are created and then equipment is added. A wire can be created by simply selecting three points, first anchor point, maximum sag point and end anchor point. For tubes, two or more points can be selected. Wires and tubes are available in the library for different conductor types according to international standards.  After conductors has been created and placed, the OSR tool provides a list of compatible library symbols for each symbol type. It is up to the user to choose which symbol should be selected. The user can select the perfect matching symbol or another one in the list. A similar workflow applies to all the other symbols like support structures and foundation heads. The system then combines the symbols to create assemblies (electrical device, support structure, foundation head) and places them in the model. Once an assembly has been created, the OSR tool will recognize identical assemblies in the point cloud and propose it for those positions in the substation. The wires are automatically attached to the respective electrical connection points on the equipment upon the insertion of the assemblies.  After the OSR tool has examined all objects in the point cloud and they have been mapped to an assembly in the model, a logical and intelligent primtech BIM model has been created. The model can be used as a full-fledged template for extension or retrofit - to create parts lists and plans as well as to carry out calculations including phase checking, clearance calculation, lightning protection calculation, sag and short-circuit effects calculations.

The new OSR technology is not fully automatic but drastically improves efficiency and reliability of converting point clouds into intelligent 3D models.This is an important advance that could dramatically improve the process of scanning brownfield substations and generating  intelligent models by making the process more efficient and less error-prone.

M. Kokorus, F. Pizarro, W. Eyrich and S. Heuser, "From Optical Symbol Recognition (OSR) of Point Clouds to the Substation Information Model," 2018 IEEE/PES Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition (T&D), Denver, CO, USA, pp. 1-4., 16-19 April, 2018

Read more about substation design

GeoIgnite: Evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial approach to construction

I thought it would be worth while to include here the plenary talk I gave at GeoIgnite 2019 in Ottawa about the growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM + geospatial approach to full-lifecycle construction. 

The UK government and others have stated clearly that they expect the largest benefits of BIM to flow from a full-lifecycle approach to construction.  As construction companies who have taken on design, build, operate and/or maintain projects have found, for full life-cycle construction projects an approach that combines BIM + geospatial significantly improves outcomes. Until the last year or two evidence of the benefits of BIM + geospatial from real world projects has not been available. Now we are beginning to see substantive data that offer evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.

Some owners have begun procuring using a design, build, maintain, and or operate model.   Engineering and construction companies who have undertaken these projects have reported significant business benefits from adopting an integrated BIM+geospatial approach to construction. Further evidence of the benefits of this approach is provided recently by the owner of a major $1.3 billion PPP construction project.  Nagpur Metro has estimated that it expects total savings in excess of US$225 million over the 25 year lifetime of a design-build-operate-maintain project.

In Canada construction contributes $137 billion, about 7 %, to the GDP annually. Construction in advanced economies have worldwide have a serious problem. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure through 2030 to keep up with global GDP growth. This will require huge amounts of private investment from pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. To attract this money will require improvements in construction productivity, but in many of the world's advanced economies, construction productivity has been flat for the past 40 years. McKinsey reports that large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption and two of the technologies that it believes will be key in that anticipated transformation are geospatial and BIM. 

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model will be during operations and maintenance, which typically represents 80% of the cost of a facility.  But to date there has been little uptake of this approach in the facilities management (FM) sector. A recent survey of the FM industry found that while 92% had heard about BIM and 84% agreed that BIM has the potential to deliver value add to FM, over two thirds said that the FM is not prepared for BIM.

The early adopters of a BIM+geospatial approach are companies who take on design, build, and maintain and/or operate projects, variously referred to as DBFM in the Netherlands, BOT in Southeast Asia, and PPP in Canada and India. Among these companies are some well-known names in global construction; Major construction firms have realized that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value for full lifecycle projects. EllisDon, Parsons Brinckerhoff , Atkins Global , Arcadis , BAM and AECOM.

For example, in Canada In Canada public–private partnership (PPP) have been remarkably successful for building and maintaining infrastructure. 15 years ago EllisDon began taking on PPP projects and quickly recognized that an integrated BIM+geospatial simplified capturing and maintaining data over the full project lifecyle of a project. As a result Integrated BIM + geospatial has become a best practice on P3 projects at EllisDon.

Owners have found that BIM+geospatial integration provides greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance. A leader in this space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch transportation authority, began offering design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects a number of years ago which has motivated private Dutch engineering and construction companies to adopt an integrated geospatial+BIM approach to construction. The firm Royal BAM Group nv/BAM Infraconsult adopted integrated BIM + geospatial because of market developments including more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project. This includes reality capture using LiDAR scanning at the beginning of the project, before design, to capture an acuurate representation of the location where construction will take place. During the design and build phases of the project everything captured is georeferenced so that it can be migrated to an integrated GIS+FM system for maintenance activities. 

The Crossrail project in London which was the largest engineering project in Europe at the time, adopted a full-lifecycle BIM+geospatial approach with targets of 20% savings on design and construction and 40% savings during operations and maintenance.

In Southeast Asia for a BOT (build-operate-transfer) substation expansion project won by Malaysian company PESTECH to design, build and operate the substation for 25 years. PESTECH adopted an integrated BIM+geospatial approach which included reality capture of the existing substation at the beginning of the project using LiDAR and georeferencing everything including engineering drawings, digital photos, point clouds, BIM models, and other construction documents. The benefits that were realized as a result of this apporach included reduced design time, fewer site visits, reduced land requirement and material waste, and most importantly for keeping the project on budgets and on schedule no change orders.

In China a geospatial+BIM approach was adopted for the Miaoshan 220kV Secondary Transformer Substation project. This was a large indoor substation in Dongxihu District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province. The project integrated digital tools for construction, site preparation, mechanical, electrical, and protection. The 3D digital modeling approach enabled collaborative design of an indoor substation with restricted space with multiple voltages in a very congested urban area with minimal impact on the existing buildings and infrastructure and all of this within a tight time frame. One of the important benefits of the approach was that minimized the impact of the substation on the existing infrastructure. Since the transformer substation is located in the downtown of Wuhan where buildings are dense, reality capture (laser scanning) was used to model the area surrounding the substation. This helped to ensure the substation site design did not conflict with surrounding buildings. To enable combining the model, the point cloud data, the digital terrain model and other external data everything was geolocated (Bentley calls this geo-coordinated). Geo-coordination, a term minted by Bentley, enables engineers and facilities managers to find things that are tagged,related, or close to a building element and it makes it possible to navigate the information environment, not only 3D design models (virtual reality), but also 3D models in a real world context (augmented reality). For this project it was fundamental not only for integrating the substation design in its real world context, but also for making it possible to reuse the BIM model and associated data during operation and maintenance.

In the U.S. AECOM, which is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector and has been ranked for eight years running #1 in Engineering News Record‘s “Top 500 Design Firms”, uses BIM + GIS on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) projects around the world. AECOM has applied this approach to the external campus of Denver International Airport, and to lease management at Orlando, Hong Kong, and South West Florida international airports. AECOM has found that the advantage of an integrated BIM+GIS approach based on a centralized integration of information is that it allows the client to make strategic decisions during the design, build and operate phases of the construction life-cycle.

The first project I have come across that has attempted estimate total savings attributable to an integrated BIM+geospatial full life-cycle approach to construction is the Napgur Metro project. This is a US$1.3 billion project underway in Nagpur, and appears to be the first project in Asia to integrate a digital twin with an asset management system to eliminate information loss about assets during design and construction. Since the Nagpur system implements a full-lifecycle approach to project management, the location of each of the 500,000 assets comprising the systems is recorded making it possible to click on an asset in SAP and be shown the location of the asset in a 3D map. Final deliverables are digital models rather than paper drawings providing a basis for digitalizing operations and maintenance. The benefits of a 3D BIM+geospatial approach have been projected based on a 25 year lifetime for the project. It is estimated that this will result in US$400,000 savings during plan, design and build. But the big benefit of an integrated BIM+geospatial approach is expected during the 25 year maintain and operate phase of the project. It is expected that operating manpower requirements will be reduced by 20%. The really big payoff is an estimated savings of US$222 million over the lifetime of the project.

Reflecting this trend toward integrated BIM+geospatial there has been a massive consolidation over the past decade of the major hardware and software vendors providing geospatial, BIM and reality capture equipment and software. Hexagon AB, founded in in 1975, began major acquistions in the 1990s which included Leica Geosystems and Intergraph. It has now reached $3.49 billion annual revenue. Trimble founded in 1978 also embarked on major acquisitions including Sketchup and Tekla and is now a $2.7 billion construction equipment and software company. More recently Topcon (Japan) acquired Sokkia and Clearedge and has achieved $1.2 billion in annual revenue. Perhaps most significantly as an indicator for this trend in the industry, Autodesk ($2.46 billlion) and ESRI ($1.1 billion), the 800 pound gorillas in BIM and GIS, respectively, have announced a partnership to improve interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds. Finally, Bentley ($700 million) + Siemens ($105 billion) are working closely on a number of construction projects.

As a growing number of owners see the advantages of a full life-cycle approach in construction projects and begin to change their procurement practices, construction companies are changing their business processes to optimize facility maintenance and operation.  The leading edge of this trend is AEC companies that have taken on the challenge of design, build, operate and/or maintain projects. They have reported that they have realized significant benefits from an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction. Now it appears that the word is getting out. Standards organizations in both the AEC and geospatial worlds are making progress on BIM+geospatial interoperability. Major software vendors Autodesk and ESRI have announced an agreement to partner for greater interoperability between their products. The open source community is also addressing the issue of BIM+geospatial interoperability. In the past the quantified advantages of an integrated BIM+geospatial approach have remained for the most part company internal, but we are now beginning to see data from real world projects that offer quantitative evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.

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.

Role of surveyors in digitally mapping underground utilities

Last week I was invited to speak at the Alberta Land Surveyors Association Annual General Meeting in Banff, Alberta about locating and mapping underground infrastructure. I thought it would be worthwhile to share the talk that I gave where I highlighted opportunities for surveyors.

The subsurface is often ignored.  This is partly a case of out-of-sight is out-of-mind. But it is also the result of broken business processes in the construction industry that place much greater value on physical assets than on what is now being called the digital twin representing the location, behaviour and status of underground assets.  Knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the recent explosions in San Francisco and Durham NC and the evacuation just last week of a neighbourhood in Calgary when a 6" gas line was hit during an excavation come to mind.

Impact of unknown and inaccurately located subsurface infrastructure and geotechnics

The best documented example I know of the economic impact of not knowing accurately where underground infrastructure is the Sydney Light Rail Extension Project.  This is a $2.1 billion PPP project for 12 km of light rail to be completed by 2019. Prior to awarding the contract for construction the Department of Transport for New South Wales undertook 12 months of work to map 5,000 subsurface utilities along the route. 500 existing subsurface utilities were identified for relocation to make way for the new light rail infrastructure. During construction it was found that the as-built information from utility providers was frequently unreliable including incorrect location and incorrect materials. The second problem was that during construction an additional 400 unknown services were encountered. As anyone in the construction industry will tell you - discovering unknown underground utility infrastructure occurs frequently on construction projects. Both of these caused disruption and delays with construction. In this case ACIL Allen, a respected Australian consulting firm, was asked to estimate what the impact of unknown and inaccurately located utilities was on the project. Their study concluded that if a complete and reliable 3D map of underground infrastructure had been available at the project planning stage, the project could have been completed at least one and a half years sooner, at less cost with a much lower level of risk. While the project apparently remained ‘on time and on budget’, ACIL Allen says that this is only because the risk of delays and additional costs resulting from unidentified underground utilities were included in the contract pricing and schedule.

An example that shows the benefit of knowing where underground utility infrastructure is located is the I-20/I-59 Corridor project in Alabama.  This is a $750 million interchange project in the heart of Birmingham's business district.  For this project the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) took an unusual approach.  Using potholing, scanning with ground penetrating radar, professional surveyors and existing as-built records a 3D model of below-ground utilities was created.  When the project was put out to tender each contract each bidder was provided with the 3D model.  ALDOT estimated that it saved $10 million on the project with this approach.  Perhaps more importantly the project remains on schedule and on budget - remarkable for a project of this complexity and magnitude in a dense urban environment.

Setting the context: the construction industry is ripe for digitalization

To put this in context there is massive investment in infrastructure projects around the world as evidenced by the US$ 90 billion Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor project in India which will affect some 180 million people.  McKinsey estimates that we will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure over the next decade or so.  But how infrastructure is financed is changing and this is changing the construction industry.  Governments have less and less money for capital projects.  Since 2003 growing amounts of private capital have been going into infrastructure projects.  In 2016 total private investment in infrastructure projects reached nearly $80 billion.  Unlike government which looks for a social return, private investors such as pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds require a financial return.  This drives a focus on improving productivity. As the automobile manufacturing, financial services, airline and other industries have shown this drives investment in IT technology. 

McKinsey has made the case that construction is ripe for transformation and that digitalization will be a key technological driver.  R&D investment in the construction industry has been among the lowest of any industry, ranking nearly last, at the same level as hunting.  Construction productivity in the world's advanced economies including Germany, Japan, UK, EU, US, and South Korea has been stagnant or declining for the past 40 years, a period during which general industrial productivity has more than doubled.  McKinsey has made the case that digitalization could help raise construction productivity and identified five technologies that it believes will be key for transforming the construction industry.  Two of these are building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial.

BIM+geospatial provides the basic technology for modelling underground infrastructure.  BIM involves a 3D model, associated data, and a collaborative approach to construction. BIM has been or is being mandated for public works in many countries and has also been adopted by many private sector companies.  Furthermore there is growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM + geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction, especially for infrastructure projects.  For example, it has been estimated that applying this approach for the Nagpur Metro project will save over $200 million over the 25 year lifetime of the project.  In Canada EllisDon, who began taking on PPP projects 15 years ago, has made integrated BIM+geospatial a best practice for their PPP projects. 

To drive improved financial returns and attract private capital owners and the construction industry are looking for low hanging fruit. Reducing the risk of unknown and inaccurately mapped underground utilities can dramatically reduce costs and duration for construction projects as the Alabama I-20/I-59 Corridor project has shown. 

Key facts about unreliable and incomplete information about subsurface infrastructure

The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) collects statistics regarding damage to underground infrastructure during construction.  The CGA estimates that there are 400,000 cases of utilities being hit during excavation every year at at average cost of $4000 in direct costs per hit. In the U.S. according to Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) underground utility conflicts and relocations are a major cause of project delays during road construction.  In addition every year there are injuries and deaths attributable to hitting underground utilities. 

In the U.K. research by the University if Birmingham has estimated that the direct cost of a utility strike during construction ranges from £ 300 for water and sewer to £ 2,800 for fiber-optic cables.  More importantly the indirect and social cost, which includes traffic disruption, injuries to workers and the public, and loss of business custom was estimated to be about 30X the direct cost.

Every construction project requires investing time and effort prior to and during excavation to locate underground utilities. Construction bids are routinely inflated by 10-30% to accommodate risk associated with unknown or poorly located underground utilities  In the U.S. this has engendered what is estimated to be a $10 billion per year industry. Every state in the U.S. and most provinces in Canada have a one-call centre and legislation that requires anyone planning to excavate to contact the centre.  Utilities and telecoms are required to send crews to locate and indicate with paint or pin flags the location of their underground infrastructure.  Because they are considered liable for any underground damage, wise construction contractors do not rely solely on this information but increasingly use expensive vacuum and hydro excavation equipment in detecting and exposing underground infrastructure during excavation.  But the information captured by these techniques is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again.

Together this represents a considerable drag on the construction industry.  In the U.S. if indirect and social costs are included this represents at least a $50 billion drag on the economy and this does not include insurance costs.  Of this the largest share is borne by the consuming public in the form of service disruption - phone, power, heating and water outages.

Several university studies have estimated the benefit in terms of an ROI of knowing accurately where underground infrastructure is located. One of the most recent by Pennsylvania State University found $21 in cost saving for every dollar invested in improved location information about underground infrastructure.  In the U.S. the Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) cites studies that have shown that the cost of detecting underground utilities prior to construction typically costs less than 0.5 percent of the total project construction cost, saves more than $4 for every $1 spent, and can reduce project delivery time by as much as 20 percent. A study resulting from an underground survey in Milan in preparation for a World Fair there estimated that €16 were saved for every € invested in accurately locating underground infrastructure.

Underground utilities and highway construction

The Alabama I-20/I-59 Corridor project has shown that a 3D map of underground infrastructure can reduce risk and keep highway construction projects on budget and on schedule. As Ron Singh, who was Chief of Surveys at the Oregon DoT, has argued, underground utilities are a huge problem for highway construction projects.  In his view we need to stand the traditional highway construction process on its head.  He explained that this means the traditional approach - survey, design, locate utilities, move utilities, build, and prepare as-builts - needs to be replaced by an approach that relies on a prior 3D model of above and below-ground infrastructure which will provide 85% of the information required about the existing site and situation.  The new process will require a rapid initial survey for sanity checking the information in the 3D model followed by design with knowledge of underground utilities.  This approach would avoid expensive moving of utilities as much as possible and only move utilities that cannot be avoided during design.  During construction underground utilities would be laser-scanned. A post-project 3D survey and laser-scanning would replace paper as-builts.  A side-benefit of this approach is that it would with time build up accurate models of highways which many believe will be essential for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles.

Cost-effectively mapping the underground

The keys to cost-effectively and accurately mapping underground infrastructure are first of all policies and technologies that ensure that the location of new infrastructure going into the ground is captured accurately and cost-effectively,  secondly policies and technologies that require that the location of infrastructure exposed during construction is captures accurately and cost-effectively, and thirdly policies for sharing information about underground infrastructure (essential in the U.S. where this information is restricted under Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) regulations).  These goals will require modernized quality standards for underground infrastructure, standards for sharing underground infrastructure location data, and hardware and software advances for cost-effectively and accurately detecting and recording the location of existing underground infrastructure.  There are important opportunities for professional surveyors in capturing accurately and responsibly the location of new and existing infrastructure.  The challenge will be to develop new business practices and adopt new technologies to be able to do this cost-effectively so as not to significantly increase the cost of construction or burden government with major additional mapping costs.

Technology advances in detecting underground infrastructure

A research project by Costain and Bentley investigated using photogrammetry with photos taken by consumer grade smartphones together with professionally surveyed control points. Typically it involves taking 40-60 pictures of exposed infrastructure with a smartphone. This process has been found to result in a 3D model of comparable accuracy to a traditional survey, is much more cost-efficient and once the control points are surveyed is something that anybody can do. Most importantly it enables the capture of accurate underground utility location during construction with little additional cost.

In a similar vein Bentley Systems has experimented with a system that equips excavation equipment with four inexpensive digital cameras that are used to collect images of underground infrastructure encountered during excavation.  The resulting videos and images were then loaded into Bentley ContextCapture software and exposed pipes and cables located with centimeter accuracy by referencing accurately surveyed neighbouring structures such as houses and other buildings.  Again this approach enables the capture of accurate location data about underground infrastructure location during construction with little added cost.

In 2018 two technical advancements in detection were reported that bring the cost-effective mapping of underground infrastructure at the municipal, regional, and national level closer to reality. T2 Utility Engineers, based in Whitby, Ontario commercially use a IDS GeoRadar Stream EM multi-channel ground penetrating radar (GPR) array towed routinely at 10-12 km/hr to capture subsurface data.  In a separate initiative a successful proof of concept has been reported by DGT Associates in Mississauga, Ontario in which data collected by a Siteco rig combining a Faro mobile laser scanner and Sensors and Software GPR arrays collected data simultaneously above and below ground at roadway speeds of 80 to 90 km/hr. In both cases the data was collected in soil conditions that were less than optimum for GPR. Being able to capture data at or near roadway speeds addresses an important obstacle to efficiently creating 3D maps of the underground. In both cases significant time was required to post-process the collected sc 3D models.  However, advances in software are making this process more reliable and faster.

In another interesting development Lux Modus has developed a rig and software running in the cloud that captures 3D location information in "near real-time" as a pipeline is constructed.  The rig includes LiDAR and photo cameras which capture the trench and the pipeline by driving along each section before the trench is filled to record a point cloud and photos.  The point cloud and images are uploaded for cloud processing and within minutes to hours a digital twin of the pipeline can be viewed by anyone with a browser that supports HTML5 including mobile devices.  For example, this makes it possible for QA/QC people to use mixed reality to identify weld points in the office rather than having to go out in the field.

Satellite sensors are also finding application in detecting damage to underground infrastructure.  Planetek has developed an application Network Alert that uses Sentinel-1's radar interferometry to monitor ground subsidence with millimeter precision.  Network Alert alerts water utilities af areas of subsidence which can be symptoms of water leaks.

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

In the UK there have been quite a few research initiatives relating to underground infrastructure. The Mayor of London and the Smart London Infrastructure Network, which is composed of utilities responsible for water, energy, telecommunications and waste management in London, sponsored a challenge with the objective of developing digital technologies to accurately locate underground assets, including pipes, cables and joints, and determine their condition. The goal was to improve safety, and to reduce operational downtime, cost and environmental impact, and disruption. A national 10 year academic research program Mapping the Underworld focussed on remote-sensing for locating sub-surface utilities is completed and been replaced by a follow-on 10 year program Assessing the Underworld. The BIM for the Subsurface (2015-2017) project, funded by Innovate UK, aimed to address issues such as project delays due to unforeseen ground conditions by applying the BIM process directly to ground investigation and subsurface infrastructure design.

Sharing information about the underground

To complement the advances in detection there are several initiatives to develop ways to share information about underground infrastructure that is captured during construction. The City of Chicago has launched a pilot to deploy a platform for collecting data and creating and sharing a 3D map of underground. It is based on new technology developed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Real-Time and Automated Monitoring and Control Lab (RAAMAC) and Chicago start-up CityZenith. During excavation a dozen or more pictures are captured with an inexpensive digital camera. RAAMAC's software uses the photos to create a 3D digital model of the underground infrastructure. These models can be securely shared between the City of Chicago and construction contractors to improve project planning and limiting accidents. The advantage of this approach to data collection is that it does not interfere with construction and does not add any significant cost.

But perhaps the initiative that everyone interested in improving knowledge of the underground should be following is a national program in the Netherlands which is supported by legislation and standards. In 2015 a new law was passed by the States General which created the Basisregistratie Ondergrond (BRO) or Key Registry for the Subsurface.  This database is open and accessible to all citizens of the Netherlands.  This went live in 2018 and requires that if you excavate or drill you have to share your data relating to geotechnics with the BRO registry. In addition if when using the data in the registry you find something is incorrect you are required to report it.

While the BRO registry in the Netherlands relates to subsurface geotechnics, the Geopatial Commission in the Cabinet Office in the U.K. government has just announced an initiative to create a registry of underground infrastructure assets.  The register will show where electricity and telecom cables, and gas and water pipes are buried and is intended to prevent both accidents and disruption to the economy.  The project will start with £3.9 million pilot projects split between London and the North East.

Worldwide initiatives to map underground infrastructure

There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database. I have blogged about a few shared databases of utility location data (water, sanitary and storm sewers, electric power, telecommunications, gas, and district heating) I've encountered worldwide over the years: Sunderland UK, Netherlands, France, Chicago, Alabama, Singapore, Sydney, Milan, the KLIC system in the Netherlands, KLIP in Belgium, Penang, Sarajevo, Calgary, Edmonton, Jalisco, UK, Japan, Bahrain, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Delhi, Bern, and even an open water network portal in New Zealand. Perhaps the closest to a shared integrated infrastructure database is the one supported by the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) in British Columbia which includes geospatial data for property boundaries, utility and communications networks, taxation jurisdictions, conservation districts, and the agricultural land reserve. Most of the shared infrastructure information initiatives I have come across involve government, some result from regulation, others are run by government, still others involve cooperation between government and participating utilities and communications firms, and a few are voluntary industry consortia.

The grandfather of shared underground infrastructure databases is the system developed many years ago for Tokyo. The mainframe-based Road Administration Information Center (ROADIC) system, which was deployed first in Tokyo and then in other major cities in Japan, provides information about the location of underground infrastructure including telecommunications and utilities.

In North America the City of Calgary, Alberta mandated the JUMP (Joint Utility Mapping Project) many years ago. A city by-law requires that anyone placing cables or pipes undergound within city limits provide 2D maps in electronic form showing the location of the infrastructure. Originally in the form of DGN files the maps only show location and type of infrastructure (water, gas, electric power, telecom) and owner. The City of Edmonton, Alberta also has a shared facilities mapping database.

Las Vegas has conducted a pilot for a 1.5 mile corridor of Main Street in old Las Vegas.  Using a variety of reality capture technologies including GIS, survey, design records, test holes, and ground penetrating radar (GPR) a 3D model of above below-ground infrastructure was prepared.  Las Vegas also attempted to ensure that in the future accurate 3D location of new or displaced infrastructure would be captured.  Contractors were required to use open trenching, to survey new and displaced utilities before closing trenches, and to avoid trenchless digging if possible.  Augmented reality was used to visualize above and below-ground infrastructure.

In France a national regulation requiring mapping of subsurface infrastructure titled Decree relating to excavations near underground, overhead or underwater transmission or distribution networks was promulgated on 15 February 2012. It requires mapping all critical underground infrastructure in urban areas by 2019 and in rural areas by 2026. Across France different departmental organizations have taken responsibility for implementing the decree. 

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) of Singapore intends to release a masterplan of Singapore's subsurface infrastructure in 2019.​ It will be released as part of the next national Master Plan for Singapore's development in the medium term. When completed it will provide the first comprehensive 3D map at what lies beneath the surface from utilities a few meters deep to transportation tunnels, deep sewer lines, deep petrochemical storage, deep water reservoirs and even deep ammunition stores.

The North East Underground Infrastructure Hub (NEUIH) is the overall initiative name for an initiative supported by the Ordnance Survey and Northumbrian Water to map underground infrastructure in the North East of England. The first phase of this project was a ‘Common Infrastructure Map’ covering a few small sample areas around Newcastle.  This combined map is the first step towards creating the NEUIH.  The current phase of the OS initiative is called ‘Sunderland sand box’ and implements a dataset that contains almost full water, gas, electricity and a great deal of telco data for the city of Sunderland.

Standards for underground infrastructure

Recently there have been developments that reflect improvements in underground remote sensing technology. Standards for reporting the reliability of the locational information about underground utilities have been in place for decades. In the U.S. the 2003 ASCE 38-02 which has been used for classifying location information about underground infrastructure according to its estimated reliability, is widely seen as being out of date. In Canada the CSA S250 standard released in 2011 specifies absolute precision levels for exposed utilities. In France the 2012 presidential decree defines three explicit levels of cartographic accuracy for underground structures; A - less than 40 centimeters, B - 40 centimeters to 1.5 meters, and C - greater than 1.5 meters.  In the UK the 2014 Publicly Available Specification PAS128, developed under the auspices of the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and others, not only includes the A,B, C, D quality levels of the U.S. standard, but extends it with explicit precision levels B1 to B4 that reflect the improved capabilities of underground remote sensing technologies such as electromagnetic induction and ground penetrating radar. A process to revise PAS128 to reflect newer technical developments has just been initiated.

For sharing information about underground infrastructure the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) underground information initiative, with the appropriate acronym MUDDI, is intended to provide an open standards-based way to share information about the below ground. The MUDDI project has identified several different broad use cases that the model is intended to support including routine street excavations (EX), emergency response (ER), utility maintenance programs (OM), large scale construction projects (AE), disaster planning and response (DP), and smart cities programs (SC). For each of these, several basic requirements that the model needs to satisfy have been identified. For street excavations the requirement is location of all entities with high horizontal, medium vertical accuracy (2.5D) of underground infrastructure; for large construction projects, detailed 3D geometry of underground infrastructure and detailed 3D geology; for emergency response, interdependencies between different networks; for utility maintenance, network topology and facility location and condition; and for smart cities the ability to monitor and relate streams of data from sensors.

The MUDDI model is intended to build on and be compatible with many existing reference/target models. For infrastructure these include CityGML with Utility Network ADE (Application Domain Extension) , INSPIRE Utility Networks, IMKL (Information model for cable and pipes), BIM-IFC, Land and Infrastructure Conceptual Model (LandInfra), Singapore Underground Geospatial Model, PipelineML, Underground Pipeline Information Management System, CIM (Common Information Model), Multispeak, ESRI Utility Model, and GEOfeature. For geotechnics, the reference/target models are GeoSciML, INSPIRE Geology, GroundwaterML, BGS National Geological Model, EarthResourceML, GeoTOP, SoilEML, IFC Geotechnical Extension, MINnD, and BoreholeIE.

To provide a way for the model to be used by different types of users, the concept of profiles has been introduced. Profiles have been used for other OGC standards and allow for different levels of complexity for different domains and applications. The proposed profiles include asset, excavation, emergency, planning and integration profiles.

National initiatives to map underground infrastructure

In the UK combining above and below-ground information into one national digital twin will allow industry to share business developments and innovation activities.  Project Iceberg is an exploratory project undertaken by the British Geological Survey, Ordnance Survey and the Future Cities Catapult to investigate ways to integrate data and services relating to the underground with other city data. To date two reports Market Research into the Current State of Play and Global Case Studies and Defining the problem space for an integrated data operating system above and below ground have been published and are publicly available.The medium term objective is to take these concepts forward with project partners to develop new digital data demonstrator projects.

In the U.S. to begin to address the challenge of accurately mapping national critical infrastructure the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), Arizona State University (ASU), the American Geographical Society (AGS), and the National Academy of Construction (NAC) convened leaders in public administration, infrastructure development, geography, geospatial, and data integration/open data at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

At Geospatial World Forum 2019 I learned of an initiative in Estonia, one of the most digitalized countries in the world to create a national digital twin of above and below-ground infrastructure.

Wrap-up

In summary unreliable information about the location of underground infrastructure and underground geotechnics costs world economies billions of dollars every year.  Missing or inaccurate information adds risk to every construction project.  In the U.S. locating subsurface infrastructure is a $10 billion per year industry.  The information is rarely shared with the result that this information is recaptured over and over again.  To provide a standard for sharing information about the underground including infrastructure and geotechnics the Open Geospatial Consortium has initiated a standards development effort called MUDDI which is being built on many existing standards.  An important national initiative to share information about the underground has begun in the Netherlands.  The UK government has just initiated the process to create a national registry of underground assets in the U.K.

A number of cities and regions around the world which have already recognized the importance of reliable information about the underground have developed ways of collecting and sharing information about the subsurface.  Recently the awareness about the importance of information about the subsurface has reached the national level.  France has mandated that the location of critical underground infrastructure must be known to within 40 cm.  Recent initiatives in Estonia, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S. are aimed at creating national digital twins including underground infrastructure.

Professional surveyors could have an important role in capturing accurately the location of new and existing infrastructure.  The challenge will be to develop new business practices and adopt new technologies to enable this to be achieved cost-effectively – in the short term it cannot increase the cost of construction or burden government with significant additional mapping costs. In the long term the benefits include reduced risk for construction contractors which will reduce costs especially insurance. It will also provide significant benefits to owners including government by reducing the cost of infrastructure construction and maintenance.

Machine learning cost-efficiently creates high quality utility GIS data for smart grid applications

Many utilities' GIS contains only a small part of what is required for managing a smart grid.  Often even the data in the GIS is too unreliable to use for smart grid applications.  For example, utility GISs may not include which customers are connected to which transformer, or if they do include this information it is incomplete or incorrect.  Many utility GISs cannot identify the phase(s) each customer is using and they may not include network topology - what is connected to what.  Other missing data may includes street lights, distributed energy generation such as rooftop PV panels, the type and condition of poles, joint use of poles, and encroachment.  To correct these problems typically requires a foot survey which is expensive.  For example, a pole inventory costs at least $20 per pole.  At the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Energy Summit at EPRI in Charlotte, John Simmins of EPRI described the research he is leading at EPRI to use modern technology including machine learning to reduce this cost to pennies per pole using available imagery such as Google Streetview.

I began working in the utility and telecom sector in 1993, specifically in developing software for records management (called network documentation outside of North America), and at that time the magnitude of the AEC+geospatial cultural mismatch was just beginning to be appreciated by utilities and telecoms. Planners tend to use GIS tools, engineers and designers CAD tools, construction folks in the field paper CAD drawings, and asset managers FM, GIS or integrated tools. Fashioning AEC and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represented a challenge that remains a problem for utilities.  For many utilities the backlog of as-builts and updates waiting to be entered into the GIS stretches into months, with the result that GIS data is permanently out of date inhibiting management and field staff from relying on this data operationally.  The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from its very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data in a common workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

There are signs that modern technology is beginning to offer a solution to the problem of developing and maintaining an accurate digital model of electric power grids.

I wrote recently about a utility in western Pennsylvania that intends to implement an Advanced Distribution Systems ( ), but realized that to this requires a network data model. Duquesne Light is typical of many North American small to medium electric power utilities.  It does not have an outage management system or an electrical data model which means it is difficult to connect customers to transformers and to determine upstream devices when customers report power problems.  Currently Duquesne Light's circuit maps are AutoCAD drawings.  Duquesne Light is moving to modernize its grid and plans to deploy an Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS) including outage management (OMS), DMS and DSCADA.  But the ADMS will require developing a complete distribution electrical data model and to that in the traditional way can be expensive.

To quickly, safely and cost efficiently develop a network data model, Duquesne Light looked at several alternatives including reality capture technology.  A pickup truck was equipped with with side mounted photo and IR cameras and LiDAR laser scanners. The reality capture survey could be completed rapidly and safely, with no boots on the pavement  Actual development of the data model was completed in the office without the necessity of going to the field for quality checks because the imagery provided all the data that was required to create and verify the data model.  Duquesne Light found several significant advantages of the reality capture approach.  The first was asset accuracy - both location and asset attributes.  In addition the captured imagery could also be used for other purposes.  For example, it could be used for a joint-use audit.

But this is still basically a manual process requiring a human being to scan images.  At the Energy Summit John Simmins described his research using neural network technology to automatically identify poles and attached equipment from available imagery such as Google Streetview.  Normally applying neural networks requires large quantities of training data.  To reduce this requirement, John has evaluated "biologically inspired", forward pass, neural networks.  In this approach the algorithm first looks (foveates) for vertical things that have the characteristics of a pole, and then for the characteristics of equipment attached to the pole, for example, cross members, street lights, transformers and large cables.  From this analysis is possible to determine pole location, height and width, cross member position on the pole and projected length, street light support strut position and length, position of transformer and large cable connection locations.  The ultimate goal of the research is in addition to automatically detecting each element of equipment to identify the type, size and manufacturer of each piece.

This is not a simple problem and there is no silver bullet.  Using a standard neural network approach requires large volumes of training data.  For poles it requires images of poles with different types of damage under different lighting conditions and in different types of weather.  An Australian company SiteSee claims to be able to do this for communications towers and transmission pylons - identifying the type and manufacturer of each antenna or insulator on a tower or pylon and comparing it to the manufacturer's specification to detect signs of corrosion and other types of damage.  When what you are looking for has a distinctive geometry that differentiates it from the surroundings, a biologically inspired approach may provide a way of identifying equipment without large volumes of training data.  Another area where several different approaches have been applied to automate feature extraction is electric power transmission lines for vegetation management.

Creating a digital twin of an electric grid is essential for developing and maintaining a smart grid.  Utilities have been wrestling with this challenge for decades and in many cases their GIS data is still not much closer to what is required.  If it would be possible to use the technology that John Simmins is investigating or other technology to reduce the cost of improving the quality of their GIS data, it would accelerate the adoption of smart grid technology at many utilities.  In his presentation at the Energy Summit Jared Green described his research in using smart meter and AMI network data to map secondaries from the transformer to the home, identify sources of unmetered load, and use impedance data from smart devices to correct utility GIS data.  Given the history of the challenge to develop and maintain accurate GIS data at many utilities, these approaches represent a beacon of hope which may enable utilities to cost effectively develop a digital twin of their networks that is an essential prerequisite for a  smart grid.

BIM and reality modeling eliminate change orders for brownfield substation expansion

Companies are recognizing the benefits of an integrated geospatial and building information modeling (BIM) approach to design and construction. At Bentley‘s the Year in Infrastructure 2018 Conference in London, the winner of the Year in Infrastructure award in the Utilities Transmission and Distribution category applied BIM processes and reality modeling on a brownfield substation expansion project. The integrated approach enabled the organization to cut design time, minimize site visits, reduce land requirement and material waste, and, most importantly, eliminate change orders during construction.

This year's award winner, Pestech International Berhad, applied reality modeling and 3D modeling in the expansion of an existing substation located in a rapidly growing industrial area close to the largest airport and port in Malaysia. This was a brownfield project that involved adding 500-kilovolt capacity to an existing 275/132-kilovolt substation. 

Substation design requires coordination between multiple disciplines, including site preparation, electrical design, mechanical design, protection design, and communications design. Traditionally, substation design involves a waterfall information flow consisting of CAD drawings and paper documents among the various disciplines. It is characterized by time-consuming, error-prone manual processes that make it difficult to correct errors, change designs, and keep everyone current with the latest documents. For a brownfield project, substation design also requires frequent visits to the site, which is hazardous and time-consuming. As a result of this fractured process, multiple submissions of the design are typically submitted to the client because of design errors. Often, the land area required for the site is overestimated and the bill of materials, which is generated manually in a time-consuming and unreliable process, results in material shortages during construction.

By automating the design process, the design time to complete the electrical drawings could be reduced from five to six months to one to two months. The bill of materials, which could require weeks to months to complete manually, could be generated instantaneously with much greater precision, reducing material waste and avoiding material shortages during construction. Clash detection could be automated, making it possible to detect clashes during design. For a brownfield project, compatibility with the existing structure can be ensured with the reality mesh, thus avoiding site visits. The combined reality and BIM model represented a single source of truth enabling all disciplines to stay current. In contrast to a waterfall information flow, a centralized 3D model enables different disciplines to work in parallel. The most important project benefit is that design errors could be detected and eliminated during design, rather than during construction. As a result, there were no rework orders due to design errors.

Reality modeling is the key technology contributing to this advancement. Reality modeling is the convergence of reality capture using 3D technologies, point clouds from LiDAR, and generating reality meshes from point clouds and digital photographs with BIM design. Geolocation plays a key role in integrating these technologies. Bentley calls this process geocoordination, and it makes it very simple to integrate data from diverse reality capture sources as well as to reuse existing engineering data together with 3D BIM design models. As I have blogged about previously, integrated geospatial and BIM is essential for a full lifecycle approach for managing infrastructure assets. 

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.

Towards a digital twin of infrastructure: efficient reality capture of new pipelines

Traditionally when a new pipeline is put in the ground, either its location and depth is only approximately known or it has to be surveyed by a registered surveyor.  Now there is another alternative. At GeoAlberta 2018 is Edmonton Joseph Hlady of Lux Modus described how his company has developed a rig and software running in the cloud that allows this information to be captured in "near real-time" as the pipeline is constructed.  The rig includes LiDAR and photo cameras which capture the trench and the pipeline by driving along each section before the trench is filled to record a point cloud and photos.  The point cloud and images are uploaded for cloud processing and within minutes to hours a digital twin of the pipeline can be viewed by anyone with a browser that supports HTML5 including mobile devices.

By automatically detecting the top of the ditch and the top of the pipe, the location (x,y) and depth (z) of the pipe can be computed in real-time by the LuxGear or later in a GIS.  Lux Modus uses the Unity gaming engine to enable 3D walk-throughs in virtual reality (VR) of the pipeline after the ditch has been covered.  For example, this makes it possible for QA/QC people to use VR to identify weld points in the office rather than in the field.

Documenting construction projects with a consumer 360° camera

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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