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.

Ground-breaking initiative by Colorado DOT for capturing and sharing location of underground utilities

According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) missing or inaccurate location information about underground utilities is a major source of highway construction project delays and budget overruns.  Some jurisdictions have taken advantage of their legal right to control what goes into public right-of-ways.  I have previously blogged about Calgary, Alberta and Las Vegas, Nevada as two examples in North America, which have attempted to control the accuracy of location information about underground utilities including telecom.  The chief challenges they faced have been finding a solution to address this issue cost-effectively all the while providing survey-grade accuracy and creating QA/QC processes for ensuring that this information is accurate, up-to-date and secure.  In general this requires a multi-pronged approach involving government legislation and regulation, modern technology and partnerships between different levels of government, utilities and telecoms, and the construction companies and contractors.

I had a chance to chat recently with Rob Martindale, Utility Program Manager at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) and Chairman of the GIS and Data Management Technical Committee for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and Page Tucker, CEO and founder of Prostar Geocorp. Rob told me that in Colorado the legislative framework for managing and sharing utility information about underground infrastructure has been developed and implemented.  Using a Cloud and mobile solution developed by ProStar Geocorp, CDOT has implemented ProStar’s Precision Mapping Solution ™ to be used by CDOT as well as all of the utilities, telecoms, contractors and other stakeholders in Colorado to capture, display and share the location of utility infrastructure that lies below the earth’s surface. According to Page Tucker, ProStar’s Precision Mapping Solution leverages Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards including Web Mapping Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) and is also designed to support quality standards such as ASCE 38-02 in the US and CSA S250 in Canada. The ProStar Solution is natively built to be open source using GeoServer and seamlessly integrates with other modern technologies and legacy systems of record including Bentley, ESRI and GE Smallworld.  It also uses standard map services such as Google Maps, Bing, and OpenStreetMap for base mapping as well as LiDAR and drone imagery when higher levels of precision are required.  The Prostar Solution even integrates with One Call centers allowing the State One Call center to provide One Call tickets in real-time, so that it is possible to display the location of all open tickets and their status on a PC or mobile device such as a tablet or smart phone. The solution can even auto-populate digital locate forms based on the new One Call tickets.  The Prostar solution is also secure. Page Tucker told me that the ProStar Solution is SOC2 compliant and can use roles and privileges in the settings as well as geo-fencing to restrict views of operator networks, which is a key requirement for telecom operators.  Century Link is one of several key beta testers on the Colorado state implementation and many other utility owners including Zayo Communications have also expressed an interest in participating.

There are two components to the ProStar Solution. Transparent Earth® which is the Cloud platform and PointMan® which is the mobile application. PointMan runs on both Android and iOS and can use the device's internal GPS for mapping grade data collection as well as external GPS and RTK to identify the location of exposed or newly installed underground infrastructure in the field with precision levels that can range from a foot to centimeter accuracy without requiring a survey team.  The PointMan application according to Mr. Martindale is both intuitive and very easy for field crews to use.  Furthermore, construction contractors that have adopted the solution report that it does not add to their current workload and is already saving them time.

At this point the shared database does not include utility and telecom as-built data but Prostar incorporates support for bidirectional inclusion of this data with notifications to utilities when any of this data is changed so that it can be used for maintaining and improving utility as-builts.

This is a ground-breaking initiative involving legislation, regulation and new technology to address one of the chief causes of highway construction delays and cost overruns. CDOT's adoption of the ProStar Solution is now getting the attention from other State DOTs as well as several Federal agencies.  Utah DOT for example followed CDOT and has also implemented the ProStar Solution. 

Novel radar technology enables ground penetrating radar scanning at roadway speeds

Underground utility damage during construction is a major safety problem and drag on economies in many countries.  The technologies that are currently considered best practices for detecting underground utilities have been used for decades and are characterized by being slow, unreliable under certain conditions and for certain types of underground equipment, and hazardous for the operator.  Lately ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been getting significantly increased attention primarily because it can detect both metallic and non-metallic underground objects, capture continuous digital scans, and because it can capture 3D position of underground objects.   Using a novel radar technology, Earth Radar has developed GPR systems that works in a different manner to traditional equipment and which can scan at up to roadway speeds.  It has been applied commercially since 2008 to detect sub surface objects on projects that include highway intersections, road pavements, urban streets, and airports. 

Introduction

The Common Ground Alliance estimates that there are 400,000 cases of utility damage during construction annually in the U.S. 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. A study by the Pennsylvania State University found $21 in cost saving for every dollar invested in improved location information about underground infrastructure.

Not knowing where underground infrastructure is has engendered what is estimated to be a $10 billion per year industry in the U.S. Every construction project requires locating underground utilities prior to and during construction.

The most accurate way to determine the location of underground infrastructure is to expose it by carefully digging a hole and then bring in a survey team to survey the location.  But this is time consuming, expensive, and can be hazardous.

An increasingly viable alternative is various types of remote sensing. Currently best practice for locating underground infrastructure is walking the site or right of way with electromagnetic wands (EMI) or ground penetrating radar (GPR) pushcarts. This is slow and can be extremely hazardous.  It can also have major indirect and social costs such as lane closures on busy transportation routes.

NM-GPR a novel approach to ground penetrating radar

We are beginning to see some promising advances in remote sensing technology for detecting underground utilities. Capturing ground penetrating radar scans of below ground infrastructure data at roadway speeds would be an important step toward efficiently and safely creating 3D maps of the underground.  Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Wayne Muller of Earth Radar, a company developing new forms of GPR technology based in Brisbane, Australia.  In the last few years Earth Radar has been developing and commercially using this new radar technology.  Originally reported in a talk by Wayne Muller and Bryan Reeves Application of a traffic-speed road scanning system including a new type of 3-D GPR at the NDE/NDT for Highways and Bridges: Structural Materials Technology (SMT) conference, in August 2010 in New York City, Noise-Modulated Ground Penetrating Radar (NM-GPR) is a GPR variant that uses coded signal modulation and efficient receiver hardware to enable traffic-speed data capture. It was developed in Australia by Radar Portal Systems and a first generation version was used starting in 2008 for a range of road investigations for the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads.

One variant, called Sparas, is a trailer based 3D GPR that mesures 30 points across a 2.5m width. It is normally configured to collecting measuremnts at 60mm intervals along the road at speed of up to 100 km/hour.  Referred to as noise-modulated or coded signal GPR (NM-GPR), the core technology us a simplified approach to radar hardware that combines many fast low-fidelity measurements to create a high-fidelty image of the subsurface. The technology is able to retain the good resolution of high-frequency antenans to greater depths that conventional GPR systems can, without using different antenna sizes. Under typical soil conditions it is capable of detecting objects in high detail down to 1.5 to 2 meters and in good conditions down to 3m.  Earth Radar has also developed UtiliVision software to assist in interpreting the scans and turning the data into 3D maps.  In a recent commercial project in the Gold Coast, these technologies were used to cover 7.5 km of highway lanes and numerous side streets in just over 15 hours of scanning. More than 2000 subsurface utilities were later detected and mapped using these measurements. 

The rig that Earth Radar typically uses is composed of a vehicle equipped with four pods containing radar antennas and protective skids positioned about a cm above the road surface. A photometric stereo imaging system is also used to sumulatenously capture above ground features.

This is the first GPR system using a novel radar technology of which I am aware that has been deployed commercially for a number of years on a range of real world projects from highway intersections to highways and urban streets to airports.  This represents a major breakthrough in applying GPR to safely and rapidly scan the subsurface without lane closures and the associated traffic disruptions.

Read more about locating underground infrastructure

Underground utility damage during construction is a major safety problem and drag on economies in many countries.  The technologies that are currently considered best practices for detecting underground utilities have been used for decades and are characterized by being slow, unreliable under certain conditions and for certain types of underground equipment, and hazardous for the operator.  Lately ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been getting significantly increased attention primarily because it can detect both metallic and non-metallic underground objects, capture continuous digital scans, and because it can capture 3D position of underground objects.   Using a novel radar technology, Earth Radar has developed GPR systems that works in a different manner to traditional equipment and which can scan at up to roadway speeds.  It has been applied commercially since 2008 to detect sub surface objects on projects that include highway intersections, road pavements, urban streets, and airports. 

Introduction

The Common Ground Alliance estimates that there are 400,000 cases of utility damage during construction annually in the U.S. 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. A study by the Pennsylvania State University found $21 in cost saving for every dollar invested in improved location information about underground infrastructure.

Not knowing where underground infrastructure is has engendered what is estimated to be a $10 billion per year industry in the U.S. Every construction project requires locating underground utilities prior to and during construction.

The most accurate way to determine the location of underground infrastructure is to expose it by carefully digging a hole and then bring in a survey team to survey the location.  But this is time consuming, expensive, and can be hazardous.

An increasingly viable alternative is various types of remote sensing. Currently best practice for locating underground infrastructure is walking the site or right of way with electromagnetic wands (EMI) or ground penetrating radar (GPR) pushcarts. This is slow and can be extremely hazardous.  It can also have major indirect and social costs such as lane closures on busy transportation routes.

NM-GPR a novel approach to ground penetrating radar

We are beginning to see some promising advances in remote sensing technology for detecting underground utilities. Capturing ground penetrating radar scans of below ground infrastructure data at roadway speeds would be an important step toward efficiently and safely creating 3D maps of the underground.  Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Wayne Muller of Earth Radar, a company developing new forms of GPR technology based in Brisbane, Australia.  In the last few years Earth Radar has been developing and commercially using this new radar technology.  Originally reported in a talk by Wayne Muller and Bryan Reeves Application of a traffic-speed road scanning system including a new type of 3-D GPR at the NDE/NDT for Highways and Bridges: Structural Materials Technology (SMT) conference, in August 2010 in New York City, Noise-Modulated Ground Penetrating Radar (NM-GPR) is a GPR variant that uses coded signal modulation and efficient receiver hardware to enable traffic-speed data capture. It was developed in Australia by Radar Portal Systems and a first generation version was used starting in 2008 for a range of road investigations for the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads.

One variant, called Sparas, is a trailer based 3D GPR that mesures 30 points across a 2.5m width. It is normally configured to collecting measuremnts at 60mm intervals along the road at speed of up to 100 km/hour.  Referred to as noise-modulated or coded signal GPR (NM-GPR), the core technology us a simplified approach to radar hardware that combines many fast low-fidelity measurements to create a high-fidelty image of the subsurface. The technology is able to retain the good resolution of high-frequency antenans to greater depths that conventional GPR systems can, without using different antenna sizes. Under typical soil conditions it is capable of detecting objects in high detail down to 1.5 to 2 meters and in good conditions down to 3m.  Earth Radar has also developed UtiliVision software to assist in interpreting the scans and turning the data into 3D maps.  In a recent commercial project in the Gold Coast, these technologies were used to cover 7.5 km of highway lanes and numerous side streets in just over 15 hours of scanning. More than 2000 subsurface utilities were later detected and mapped using these measurements. 

The rig that Earth Radar typically uses is composed of a vehicle equipped with four pods containing radar antennas and protective skids positioned about a cm above the road surface. A photometric stereo imaging system is also used to sumulatenously capture above ground features.

This is the first GPR system using a novel radar technology of which I am aware that has been deployed commercially for a number of years on a range of real world projects from highway intersections to highways and urban streets to airports.  This represents a major breakthrough in applying GPR to safely and rapidly scan the subsurface without lane closures and the associated traffic disruptions.

Read more about locating underground infrastructure

Developing high precision highway maps for autonomous vehicles

Currently autonomous vehicles with some exceptions rely on on-board sensors for the detailed aspects of navigation. But many believe that high precision maps, which contain significantly more detailed information and true-ground-absolute accuracy than current road maps, will be essential for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. These high-precision 3D maps will be specifically for the self-driving vehicle market and include detailed inventories of all stationary physical assets related to roadways such as road lanes, road edges, shoulders, dividers, traffic signals, signage, paint markings, poles, and all other critical data needed for the safe navigation of roadways and intersections by autonomous vehicles.  Referred to as high definition (HD) maps they will record the location of physical highway assets to centimeters.

These HD maps have two applications in the autonomous vehicle market.  They can be used by autonomous vehicles in actual driving to augment on-board sensors with near real-time and highly accurate data of the highway and surrounding location where the vehicle is driving.  Secondly because self-driving vehicles would need to travel billions of miles in the physical world to demonstrate a significant improvement on safety for human drivers, simulation has become an essential part of the development of autonomous vehicles.

 At the 2016 SPAR3D conference I had a chance to chat with Ron Singh, then Chief of Surveys at the Oregon Department of Transport about high definition (HD) maps of highway systems.  High definition means accurate to centimeters and Ron believed that HD highways maps would be required to reduce the risk and costs of highway construction.  But he also believed that autonomous vehicles would require this information.  Today autonomous vehicles rely completely on on-board sensors. but many believe that for safe operation they will require other information that can only come from external HD maps of highways and roads.

At the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) conference in Singapore, Sharad Oberoi of Sanborn gave an insightful overview of the state of the art for automated feature extraction from combined aerial and mobile scans of highways and adjacent areas. Sanborn develops high precision maps for the autonomous vehicle market.  Sanborn has developed proprietary mapping technology that leverages aerial imagery, aerial lidar data, and mobile lidar data to create standardized, high-precision 3D base-maps focusing specifically on the self-driving vehicle market.

Recently in the UK Zenzic has commissioned the Ordnance Survey (OS) to explore the geospatial data requirements for HD maps when considering the lifecycle of testing and the data interoperability requirements to enable UK plc to provide an exemplar test facility ecosystem and set the foundations for operational deployments.  HD maps for autonomous vehicles are more complex than maps used for simple driver-based navigation systems. Mapping mustbe highly accurate (better than 5cmin resolution) and needs to contain a minimum set of road information, such as lane-level geometry and information relating to street furniture.This study has been conducted with the support of software simulation companies, the Met Office and the British Standards Institution(BSI), with the aim of understanding the data requirements, gaps and sources regarding geospatial data for self-driving vehicle testing.  A report Geodata report - analysis and recommendations for self-driving vehicle testing has been released.  It addresses why self-driving vehicles require real-time high precision maps. With high-definition maps which are updated in real-time, a self-driving vehicle is able to reference the position of other road users against what it already knows to be there. It also provides a back-up in situations where its sensors are unreliable such as poor weather conditions such as snow, heavy-rain or sun reflecting off a wet-road. 

Its key conclusions are that geospatial data is fundamental for autonomous vehicles. Maps can provide an important trusted baseline where the on-boardd sensor feed are unreliable.   To provide the framework required for the testing and driving of self-driving vehicles, current mapping specifications will need to be enhanced to include relevant street-level features, with better than 5cm resolution, more extensive information about street furniture, and interoperability with other sources of data.  An authenticated, authoritative single source of geospatial data accessible to autonomous vehicles is required. Standards relating to geospatial data in the context of autonomous vehicles are required. This is on the Open Geospatial Consortium radar. Real-time updates to mapping through sensor data feeds will also be essential.  Finally it makes some recommendations about the development of data formats (LAS 1.2 or LAZ, OBJ, OpenDrive, and ESRI shapefile), data hosting, governance, minimum safe requirements and standards.

State DOT saves millions by creating 3D map of underground utilities prior to design

Unknown or inaccurately located underground utilities can make or break a highway construction project's schedule.  For the largest construction project in the state of Alabama's history, the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) used ground penetrating radar (GPR) and other technology to create an accurate 3D model of underground infrastructure prior to designing a replacement for one of the busiest interchanges in the state.  ALDOT estimates that the 3D model, which was provided to all contractors bidding on the project, saved millions of dollars and reduced the risk of budget and schedule over-runs.

The location of existing underground utility infrastructure is more often than not poorly known which creates significant risk for infrastructure and highway construction projects. Typically on highway construction projects, the right of way is chosen, the highway designed and the project readied for construction before the one-call centre is contacted and the affected utilities arrive to detect and locate their underground facilities, usually in 2D.  The utilities that have been detected are then moved to make way for building the highway.  Not infrequently the location of the identified utilities turns out to be unreliable and during construction other unidentified utilities are encountered both of which can lead to delays and to budget overruns.

I blogged previously about a gas line construction project that was a Year in Infrastructure Award finalist in 2015.  For this project a 3D model of the existing underground and above ground infrastructure was created before design and construction.  The benefit of having the 3D model was clear; during construction there were no utility strikes, there were no change orders and the project was completed in 7 weeks instead of the expected 10 weeks. 

At this year's Year in Infrastructure Awards in London an outstanding project submitted by the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) was selected as finalist. The I-20/I-59 Corridor is the largest construction project in the State of Alabama’s history with a cost of $750 million.   The project has a very tight timeframe.  ALDOT's Design Bureau’s Visualization Group was tasked to provide a complete 3D proposed model for building information modeling (BIM). The BIM model needed to provide the information necessary for multiple uses including: visualizations, design checks, construction analysis, clash detection, right-of-way negotiations, lawsuits, and aesthetics. The model had to be very accurate because it was intended to be provided to the construction bidders to enable more accurate cost estimates and lower bids.

One of the important challenges faced by this project was utility coordination because the interchange is situated in Birmingham's business district.  Realizing that underground utilities can make or break a project's schedule, ALDOT invested a considerable effort in locating utilities and creating a 3D model of above and below-ground utilities. Potholing and scanning with ground penetrating radar augmented existing as-built records to enable ALDOT to create accurate 3D model of underground utilities.  3D is important because what appear to be clashes in 2D may not actually be.  Also it was much easier to explain to utilities in 3D that a costly move of a utility line is not necessary.   ALDOT’s Visualization Group was tasked with detecting clashes between the proposed design with the existing conditions. Every contractor bidding on the project got the full 3D model.  Because of the reduced risk associated with underground infrastructure ALDOT estimated that it saved over $10 million by using 3D modeling of underground and aboveground utilities.  To date the project is on budget and on schedule. After completion of the project ALDOT plans to retain the 3D model which can be reused for other projects in the same area.

ALDOT found other advantages of 3D modeling as well.  Public and stakeholder perspectives of the project was a major concern and using the 3D model allowed the Visualization Group to provide accurate photomatches, renderings, and animation to relay projects impacts to all stakeholders.  While the project is under construction the 3D model is also being used by inspectors in the field so that construction details are relayed accurately to the workers.

This project provides further evidence of the significant benefits of a 3D model of underground infrastructure which can be used during design and construction to reduce the risk of utility hits, reduce the cost of utility relocates, and avoid unnecessary utility relocates.

Avoiding serial road excavation work with Waze

Waze, now part of Google, is a crowd sourced handheld app used by 100 million drivers worldwide. It is supported by 500,000 volunteer map editors and 600 partners. Its connected partners program includes 40% of top cities and 60 % of state departments of transportation (DoTs). It is very interesting that Waze has developed a way for governments to report planned and actual road construction which can inform drivers in planning routes ahead of time. This offers a way to provide a single database that could be used to avoid the problem of the same stretch of road being dug up multiple times by different utilities sometimes with a few weeks of each other.

Several years ago I blogged about the online web-based system Koordination im öffentlichen Raum (Spatial, temporal and financial co-ordination of city planning, traffic change, and construction projects on public land) of the City of Bern, Switzerland.  This is a system for coordinating street works that achieves some of the same goals as the 2004 Traffic Management Act in the U.K. It is location aware and enables planners to avoid serial excavations of the same stretch of street or road by coordinating all construction from multiple agencies including Federal, Kantonal and city street and highway agencies, water/wastewater, gas, and electricity utilities, and telecommunications companies so that a section of street or road is not dug up more than once every five years.  In its first year of operation it was estimated that the coordination system saved SFR 7 million.

At GIS in the Rockies Saila Hanninen of Waze described some of the remarkable ways that Waze data and network are being used for purposes beyond what it was initially intended for.

• During and after Hurricane Sandy in Oct 2012 the White house called Waze for help to determine which gas stations were open in the areas hit by the strom.
• For the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, Waze helped to determine where to place three rapid transit lanes that resulted in a 27 % reduction in congestion.
• Waze helped Ghent redesign its city centre to reduce traffic by 40 % which also resulted in fewer accidents and increased bicycle and transit usage.
• Boston asked Waze to help with signal timing that resulted in 18% reduction in congestion just by changing timing.
• During the Pope's visit to Philadelphia, Waze was responsible for a 20% reduction in congestion.
• 63% of callers to 911 don't know their location - Waze can provide accurate locaction information.
• 40% of accidents are reported faster on waze which results in an average of 5 minutes faster response time.

Waze intends to get more proactive.  It now has a crisis response team, that can push messages to Waze users in areas affected by a disaster to collect information about road closures, the state of the roads, which gas stations are open, shelter availability, and safe routes to shelter.

Waze has a vision to eliminate traffic.  Altogether.   To do that requires not only information about the current state of congestion on roads, but also anything that could potentially affect traffic on roads in the future.  Knowing when road and major excavations near roads are planned is essential.  If the Waze partner program included everyone planning excavations on or near roads, it would have developed a database that would provide all the information required to coordinate excavations by utilities, telecoms, and governments.  Similarly to what happened in Bern, this could mean that roads would not be dug up more often than once in five years which would reduce traffic congestion and save money.

Rapid and safe 3D reality capture of underground utilities reduces risk for construction projects

As a follow-up to an exciting presentation at the SPAR3D / AEC NEXT 2018 event in Anaheim I had the opportunity for a very enlightening conversation with Michael Twohig of DGT Associates which I would like to share.

GZ: In your talk in Anaheim, you and Brent Gelhar of Siteco Informatica described a successful proof of concept in which a towed rig with mobile laser scanners and ground penetrating radar (GPR) arrays collected data simultaneously above and below ground at roadway speeds of up to 80 kilometers per hour.  Being able to collect data about underground infrastructure at roadway speeds is a major breakthrough in underground detection. It is much safer because it avoids boots on the pavement and it is more efficient compared to the typical GPR pushcart systems or handheld electromagnetic (EMI) pipe locator wands. Can you tell me about the rig used for data collection and the post-processing ?  How did you combine the above surface LiDAR scans with the GPR scans ?

MAT: The traditional approach for utility detection with a GPR pushcart system of data acquisition requires a trained utility survey technician working on the pavement with an complimentary EMI wand. This traditional service of utility investigation is most often performed on foot and working in a line of grid pattern to trace and mark underground facilities. The utility locator performs an on-site interpretation in the field and the results are frequently painted on the road or street surface with little or no post-processing. Recent advancements with cloud-based systems, such as Geolantis.360, have started to change the age-old work flow and with some GPR and EMI systems the meta-data from a hand-held device can be uploaded live to the office for QA/QC and documentation of work performed on-site. This work while very reliable is not only slow, but also very dangerous when working in, or close to, busy travel lanes. Paradoxically, the more functionality in hand-held devices have added to this equipment being more dangerous as it becomes more complex, because it demands more attention from the operator who also has to lookout for traffic. In most case in the US a utility locator provides locate work in travel lanes and road shoulders without the benefit of police details, traffic flag persons of traffic control measures.

To make the data acquisition process more cost-efficient and safer, we partnered with Sensors and Software, who provided the GPR arrays and the trailer configuration, and Siteco who provided the Faro mobile LiDAR scanners. Siteco had developed software for their highway surveying business in northern Italy a decade earlier that allowed the data collected by a mobile laser scanner to be combined with the output from a pavement scanner. The combined data made it possible to identify drains, hydrants, and other street furniture and relate them to the pavement scans. In our proof of concept in Mississauga, we used a GPR arrays from Sensors and Software with two different radar frequencies, 1000 and 250 Mhz, to collect data down to about two meters. The Siteco software allowed us to combine this data with the above ground LiDAR scans and digital as-builts to create 3D maps of underground utilities. The post processing of the above ground survey was done using Siteco’s software package and the surface investigation data is post processed using Sensors and Software Ekko_Project software program.

GZ: Is the post-processing still pretty much a manual process?

MAT: Yes, it is, but being able to visualize the below grounds GPR scans side by side with the LiDAR imagery and any as-built information in the office really helps speed up the process.

GZ: Does the data collection using the Siteco rig and post-processing require trained specialists?

MAT: An advantage of our approach is that the data collection doesn't require a specialist. Anybody can learn the data acquisition process and calibration with a little training. The post-processing does require a specialist and although a geophysical degree and a background is desirable it is not mandatory. Interpreting GPR scans is as much an art as a science. At DGT all of our staff in the underground detection group are surveyors or engineers and have experience interpreting GPR scans.  If you are just starting out we recommend involving someone like Daniel Bigman to assist with training and developing the necessary geophysical skill sets.

GZ: Who do you see as the market for this technology?

MAT: Anyone who needs to do design, utility locating, GIS inventories of excavation, especially, street or highway excavation projects. If a scan using our equipment is done prior to highway design, it provides information about above and below ground infrastructure over long distances and a relatively short period of time. The benefit is that little of no surveys will be required to work in travel lanes. The designer can then do preliminary design and make informed decisions in the early design phase of a project. Combining accurate above ground topography with that of utilities, above and below ground, will enhance project success and safety by avoiding the risks of unnecessary utility relocations, having to engage with underground asset owners that may need long lead times for relocations and mitigating hitting unknown utilities during construction. Unknown or inaccurately located underground utilities are a major source of project delays, so this removes an important source of major project risk. A recent example of what can happen when unknown utilities are encountered during construction is the 405 Freeway widening project in Los Angeles where workers had to remove nine miles of unexpected utility lines which contributed to delaying the project a year behind schedule and resulted in a $400 million lawsuit. We are seeing a lot of interest from highway engineering firms and contractors in this technology. We also foresee that state Departments of Transportation (DoTs) and municipal roads departments, energy companies and light rail designers will become interested as well, because this data is extremely valuable for a number of applications. For example, comparing scans of the same stretch of highway or road at different times can be used to detect subsidence which may be evidence of a potential sink holes and cave-ins.

GZ: If someone wants to take advantage of this technology what options would they have ?

MAT: One option is to buy or lease the system from Siteco and Sensors and Software. Brent Gelhar of Siteco would be able to design a system that best meets a customer needs. There will be some unique design elements required of a mobile mapping systems that would be based around the customers level of accuracy, level of detail and standard of care requirements. In this case a system can be designed and built to meet the customers needs and geographic requirements and the required training for staff would be tailored to the system. The primary software would be Siteco's software and Sensors and Software's Ekko_Project. GIS and CAD skills will also be required. Training is provided by Sensors and Software for the radar data and Siteco for the mobile Lidar data and GIS and CAD exports. Alternatively, DGT can be contracted to do the work. DGT delivers 2D and 3D CAD files of the underground infrastructure.

GZ: How large is the underground utility detection business in the U.S. ?

MAT: We estimate that it is about a $10 billion a year market. There are firms out there with annual revenues in excess of a billion dollars who have thousands of underground utility locators in the field every day.

GZ: Are you seeing more people eyeing investment in underground utility detection and mapping ?

MAT: Yes, we are seeing investor interest increasing. At DGT we have frequently been contacted by potential investors, but in the last year this has increased by 200 %.

Bentley delivers web-based open source geospatial front-end to leading road and rail asset management system

I blogged over a year ago about Bentley's support for the open source Cesium 3D globe project.  Even so I was surprised to see a Bentley Systems booth at FOSS4GNA is St Louis.  Luckily I had a chance to sit down with Pano Voudouris, Product Manager at Bentley Systems, and discovered that Bentley Systems was more involved in open source development than I suspected, specifically, in supporting the MapServer, OpenLayers, and OGR geospatial open source (OSGeo) projects.

Bentley System's AssetWise Lifecycle Information Management solution (ALIM) is an asset management tool for linear and other infrastructure assets that is composed of several different systems that Bentley acquired over the years. One of them is used to manage rail and road assets.  More than a decade ago I went to Bristol to see an exceptional asset management system for road and rail assets called Exor, that was built on Oracle's LRS (linear referencing system) which supported dynamic segmentation.  In 2010 Bentley Systems acquired Exor and since then has incorporated it into ALIM. Highways England, U.S. state DoTs, MoTs in Canada, and railways in the UK and around the globe use the product. However, it required an ArcGIS desktop, Pano explained, which Bentley felt limited its accessibility.  Bentley wanted to broaden the market for their transportation asset management system to the web so that anyone with a browser could manage and view their network and asset information.  To do this Bentley developed a web-based geospatial front end based on MapServer, OGR and OpenLayers, all of which are OSGeo open source projects.  Pano pointed out that Bentley's involvement with these projects benefits the open source communities around them because Bentley is not only using these open source geospatial libraries, but contributing back to them.

This is further evidence of the penetration of open source geospatial tools and libraries into the commercial space.  Since the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) in 2006, there has been an annual FOSS4G event that brings together open source geospatial developers, users and supporters from around the world. Last year's event in Boston, USA brought together over 1,100. There are also regional FOSS4G events around the world of which FOSS4GNA is one. Sponsors for this year's event include Redhat, IBM, Boundless, Radiant Solutions (Maxar), Amazon Web Services, Planet, Oracle, and ESRI, which further attests to the penetration of open source geospatial into the commercial market.

By way of background Cesium is an open source JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in a web browser without a plugin. Cesium is free for both commercial and non-commercial use under the Apache 2.0 license. Last year Bentley Systems joined with AGI to form the Cesium Consortium to accelerate Cesium development and support the sustainability of the project.

MapServer is an open source geographic data rendering engine written in C. In addition to allowing users to view and browse geospatial data with a web browser, MapServer supports maps that direct users to content. MapServer was originally developed by the University of Minnesota and is one of the founding projects of the OSGeo foundation.  It is supported by a diverse group of organizations that fund enhancements and maintenance, and administered within OSGeo by the MapServer Project Steering Committee made up of developers and other contributors. All source code is openly available via GitHub. 

The  OGR Simple Features Library is a C++ open source library providing read access for MapServer and other applications to a number of vector file formats including ESRI Shapefiles. OGR is part of the GDAL library which is a translator library for many raster and vector geospatial data formats and which is released under an X/MIT style open source license. 

OpenLayers makes it possible to insert a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles, vector data and markers loaded from any source. It is completely free, written in open source JavaScript and released under a BSD open source license.

Successful experiment to detect underground utilities at roadway speeds

An important risk for virtually any construction project is unforeseen costs, delays and safety issues associated with unknown or poorly located underground utilities and other objects. Currently best practice for locating underground infrastructure in preparation for excavation is walking the site or right of way with electromagnetic wands (EMI) or ground penetrating radar (GPR) pushcarts. In their talk at the SPAR3D / AEC NEXT 2018 event in Anaheim, Michael Twohig and Brent Gelhar described a successful proof of concept in which a rig combining mobile laser scanning and GPR arrays collected data simultaneously above and below ground at roadway speeds of 80 to 90 kilometers per hour.

In the U.S. the number one cause of delays in highway construction projects are unknown or poorly located underground utilities. The current best practice of walking the right of way with an EMI wand or a GPR pushcart and spray painting the location of subsurface infrastructure is not only slow, but on roads with significant traffic it is dangerous for the locate equipment operator and disruptive of traffic.

Recently a major vendor, Leica Geosystems, acquired technology, IDS GeoRadar, that enables towable arrays of GPR sensors to be operated at speeds of up to five or six kilometers per hour. The technology includes hardware, cross polarized radar arrays, and software that assists the operator in tracking radar events across multiple scans. The GPR configuration has even been combined with mobile lase scanning (LiDAR) to capture 3D data above and below ground simultaneously. However, the slow speed is a major limitation that limits the usefulness of the towable array to times when traffic is slow or volumes low.

The experiment that Michael Twohig of DGT Associates and Brent Gelhar described involves three arrays of GPR sensor from Sensors and Software incorporated into a towable rig with a SITECO Road-Scanner mobile platform equipped with Faro mobile LiDAR sensors. On the rig the GPR arrays are positioned very close to the road surface. A key feature of the design of the rig is that it prevents damage to the arrays from road debris. Two of the GPR arrays operate at 2.0 GHz, which under the clay soil condition where the experiment was carried out allowed detection of underground infrastructure to a depth of one meter. The third array operated at one GHz with penetration to about two meters.

For the proof of concept the rig was towed over a distance of 19 km at speeds averaging 80 to 90 km per hour to collect above and below data simultaneously. The practical advantage of being able to operate at this speed means data could be collected a lane at a time with no disruption to traffic and with no boots on the pavement. After the above ground LiDAR and below ground GPR data was collected, the large datasets were post-processed. The semi-automated processing of the GPR scans  required six to eight hours. I would expect that having the above ground LiDAR scans would aid in locating below ground utilities, for example, in identifying above ground features that would help identify the type of underground utility. The deliverables are 3D CAD files with underground infrastructure located with an accuracy of 5 - 10 cm. The files are compatible with industry standard GIS software. The experiment was carried out in an area of Mississauga which has been surveyed frequently by Sensors and Software in testing their equipment and thus the location of underground infrastructure was well known.

This experiment and the experience of IDS GeoRadar is a significant step forward in detecting underground infrastructure. That this experiment was carried out under less than ideal soil conditions (clay) is even more encouraging. As Brent and Michael pointed out, this experiment used only three channels and it is technically feasible to expand the configuration to eight. However, the volume of data would be proportionately larger.

I concluded that the experiment showed that the hardware configuration was successful in collecting 3D data of above and below ground infrastructure at roadway speeds. It suggests also that the next challenge is enhancing the software post-processing to better automate the process to enable the handling of large data volumes.

First step toward developing a national infrastructure map to enable smart investments

In its 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) assigned an overall grade of D+ to U.S. infrastructure. Addressing the problem of bringing national infrastructure up to a standard where it becomes an enabler of economic expansion rather then a drag on the economy is hindered by a lack of systematic information readily available to decision makers on the nation’s inventory of infrastructure assets, their location, and condition. Geospatial data and technology are key to providing an accessible platform making it possible for decision makers to have a uniform view of the nation's infrastructure.  Access to this data is constrained by a variety of factors including the lack of interoperability across systems and proprietary rights. Also, data is often not comparable.  Consequently, infrastructure challenges cannot be assessed in an integrated way or communicated effectively to the relevant decision-makers and constituencies.

Initiative to create a national infrastructure map

To begin to address this challenge National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), Arizona State University (ASU), the American Geographical Society (AGS), and the National Academy of Construction (NAC) partnered to put on an event to convene leaders in public administration, infrastructure development, geography, geospatial, and data integration/open data. Entitled "Building a Shared Map of the Nation’s Infrastructure to Enable Smart Investments" , the event was held at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

By way of background NAPA is a congressionally chartered, non-partisan organization with a mandate to make government work better.  After the last presidential election NAPA decided to get out of Washington and talk to people in different levels of government across the country.  NAPA talked to local government people in Sacramento, Austin, Syracuse, and in Virginia and came to the conclusion that there is a need for a national strategy for infrastructure.  Infrastructure is local, but data with the granularity that is required is not available.  Data is uneven, is not integrated and is basically not interoperable.  The challenge is not technical, but one of leadership and effective public administration.  The need for a national strategy was reinforced by the Trump administration's infrastructure plan which appears to only provide federal support for state initiatives.

State of U.S. infrastructure

Introduced by Terry Gerton, President and CEO of NAPA and Jonathan Koppell, Dean, College of Public Programs, Arizona State University, the keynote was delivered by Greg DiLoreto, Former President, American Society of Civil Engineers, who provided an overview of the challenge from the perspective of the latest American Society of Civil Engineers report card.

• Aviation D : Two million passengers are served daily bu U.S. airports, but congestion is growing and it is expected that 24 of the top major airports may experience "Thanksgiving-peak traffic volume" at least one day a week.
• Bridges C+ : The U.S. has 614,387 bridges of which 9.1 % or 56,000 were structurally deficient in 2016.
• Dams D : 17% of U.S. dams or 15,498 have been identified as high-hazard potential dams.  Nationwide, 73 dams failed between 2010 and 2015.
• Drinking water D : There are an estimated 240,000 water main breaks in the U.S. every year and 6 billion gallons of treated drinking water are lost every year.
• Energy D+ : There were 3,571 power outages in the U.S. in 2016. Most electric power infrastructure has exceeded its life-expectancy.
• Hazardous waste D+ : There are over 18,000 hazardous waste sites in the U.S. 53% of the American population live within three miles of a hazardous waste site.
• Inland waterways D : The U.S. has 25,000 miles of inland waterways. 49% of vessels experience delays across the waterway systems.
• Parks and recreation D+ : Seven of ten Americans use park facilities on a regular basis. About $11.9 billion in maintenance has been deferred by the National Park Service because of underfunding.
• Rail B : The U.S. rail industry invested $27.1 billion in infrastructure in 2015. Rail was one of the brighter spots on the report card.
• Roads D : America's road are often congested resulting in Americans spending 6.9 billion hours, or 42 hours per person, stuck in traffic every year.  The The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) estimates that over half of the deaths that occur on America's roadways can be blamed on poor road conditions.
• Schools D+ : There are about 100,000 schools in the U.S., serving 50 million K-12 students every day.  About a quarter of public schools are rated to be in fair or poor condition.
• Solid waste C+ : Americans generate 258 million tons of municipal solid waste every year of which 53% ends up in landfill.
• Transit D- : Transit in America is losing ridership in some regions, the result of chronic underfunding which has generated a $90 billion maintenance backlog.

The state of much U.S. infrastructure is poor because of chronic underfunding.  Greg pointed out that China spends more on its infrastructure than North America and Europe combined.  The only real bright spot in the 2017 report card is rail.  There are slight improvements in seven of the categories the ASCE tracks.  But in three sectors the ASCE's lower grade reflects a worsening assessment. Transit, solid waste and parks and recreation have seen a decline since the last report in 2013.  For 2016-2025 the ASCE estimates that there is an investment gap of about $ 2 trillion.  This is the difference between the actual allocated funding and what is needed. 

 

Substandard infrastructure reduces the income of every American.  The ASCE estimates that failure to act will result in a loss of $3.9 trillion to the U.S. economy, which translates to a loss of $3400 per year per family.  The ASCE estimates that to bring U.S. infrastructure up to an acceptable standard would require investment equivalent to a latte per day, or $4 per day, per family. 

 

To fund infrastructure properly requires increasing investment from the current 2.5% of GDP to 3.5%.  Greg emphasized that this will require increased investment from all levels of government and the private sector.  Greg suggested some ways to improve how infrastructure is funded. First, congress should raise the federal motor fuel tax.  This would increase funding of federal highways through the Highway Trust Fund.  Secondly,  the contribution from the federal government should be increased.  When the interstate highway system was built during Dwight D Eisenhower's administration, the federal government provided 90% of the funding.  Since then the funding ratio has been inverted.  Greg also emphasized that when highways are built, full lifecycle cost analysis needs to become standard practice.

 

The good news is the message about the importance of infrastructure to the economy is getting out.  A recent survey found that 87% of Americans think that the federal government should increase its investment in infrastructure.