Between the Poles

Above and underground infrastructure comprise Rotterdam's open digital twin

The City of Rotterdam is developing a digital twin of the city.  3D vector and image data of the above- and underground infrastructure, zoning regulations and city by-laws, data streams from real-time sensors, applications and simulations will comprise Rotterdam's digital twin. It is envisaged that the digital twin will enable the city to assess the impact of proposed changes in bylaws and regulations by simulating them before they are implemented. Rotterdam, and in fact the whole of the Netherlands have adopted transparency and open data as a pillar of government and are basing 3D models on open national and international standards, intend for the 3D data to be open and accessible to the public, and intend to use open source software wherever possible.

Many cities have 3D models of their aboveground infrastructure; buildings, transportation networks, parks, and other infrastructure typically captured in 2D or 3D imagery from overflights or in 2D GIS maps.  Imagery is not very smart and extracting 3D vector objects such as building footprints, heights, profiles and transportation networks requires sophisticated post-processing.  Even more importantly, underground infrastructure is usually neglected, even though it is recognized that water and wastewater, energy (gas, electric power, and district heating),  and communications (fibre and copper) networks provide the life blood of the city.

Rotterdam has been developing its 3D model, which underpins the digital twin, for several years.  Currently it contains street furniture such as street lights, trees and underground parts of street furniture, a large scale basemap, a complete map of underground networks of cables and pipes, buildings, and non-physical content such as zoning regulations and  bylaws.  The 3D model is kept in sync with data repositories maintained by city departments and others.  In the future it will also include real-time data streams from a variety of sensors. 

The 3D model is open, based on open standards and many of the applications that have been developed for it are open source projects. For example, visualizations rely on Cesium, an open source initiative which has just announced support for visualizing underground utilities, mines, and geological layers. The rationale for the data being based on open standards is that an standards-based environment creates an open data commons where developers can devote their time to developing innovative applications rather than spending time converting data from one format to another.

The Dutch 3D standard is an integration of CityGML Application Domain Extension (ADE) and the existing national IMGeo standard for large-scale representations of roads, water bodies, and land use. The Dutch Kadaster, Geonovum, the Netherlands Geodetic Commission and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment initiated a "3D Pilot NL" to develop a national 3D standard.  Existing intnernational standards including CityGML(Open Geospatial Consortium), IFC (buildingSMART), and others were investigated. The findings of the pilot  resulted in a national 3D standard implemented as a CityGML Application Domain Extension (ADE) that integrates the latest version of the existing Dutch national standard IMGeo 2.0. 

Current applications (virtualcitySYSTEMS, ESRI, IMAGEM and Unity) use the 3D model as input for analytics and visualization. One can imagine many use cases for the data in the Rotterdam 3D model. Among these three use cases have been identified as low-hanging fruit; climate adaptation, viewsheds and energy performance of buildings. 

Much of Rotterdam is below sea level and managing rain water accumulation during heavy rainfalls is a major issue. which affects building basements, subway entrances, low-lying roads, electrical transformers, and other infrastructure.  To address this problem, the concept of "water squares" has been developed and the 3D model used to determine the optimum location for these..  Water squares are open areas where water can safely be allowed to accumulate during heavy rainfalls to avoid overstressing storm sewers. 

In another application of the 3D model data, building data can be filtered and streamed to energy performance applications that provide insights into how buildings perform.

Open standards and open data also enables the sharing of data among cities in the Netherlands.  The Dutch Kadaster has developed an open 3D map of the whole of the Netherlands, with scales ranging from 1:500 to 1:25,000 in collaboration with academic, private sector, and public sector partners.  All data in the 3D map is built on the basis of open standards.  The map was created by combining existing 2D data with the Elevation Model of the Netherlands resulting from a LiDAR survey which covers the whole of the Netherlands with a resolution of eight elevation points per square meter.

Open data and open standards also relate to a critical issue that is of growing importance. Many governments have adopted transparency and open data as a cornerstone of democratic policy.  But often digital twins for smart cities are being developed by private-sector firms or by public-private initiatives.  As William Davies points out in Nervous States, "the IT infrastructure used to build e-geovernment projects or "smart cities" comes from the commercial sector, and the companies that provide it often retain control over the data that results." 

For example, recently a joint Alphabet/Google/Sidewalk Labs and City of Toronto initiative to develop a smart city on Toronto's waterfront foundered and was cancelled.  One of the reasons, it is argued, is that a technology giant such as Google (or Facebook, Amazon, ...) is not a vendor in the traditional sense, but a "surveillance capitalist" that collects and analyzes behavioural data captured from users for its own economic imperatives.  In the context of a smart city the opportunities for data collection from citizens and from systems such as water and wastewater, transit, waste removal, traffic management, and others are immense.  If this data is appropriated and becomes proprietary, it puts a private entity in a position to supplant democratic government, which doesn't have access to this huge volume of data and the analytics which extracts information from it.  Relying on open standards and ensuring that data is open and accessible to the public are essential to avoid citizens' and municipal data becoming proprietary.  Furthermore, using open source software and, I would add, open training data for machine learning applications helps avoid the problem of the analytics also becoming proprietary.

Based on a Webinar by Christian Veldhuis, Advisor City of Rotterdam, Rick Klooster, CCO, FUTURE INSIGHT and Antje Kunze, Director Sales & Marketing, virtualcitySYSTEMS.

Elements for improving underground utility mapping to reduce risk of damage during construction

Without accurate maps of underground infrastructure, every construction project has the potential to become a disaster site. Unlike the aviation industry where reliable data is collected and is accessible to investigators to prevent disasters from happening in the future, there is limited access to data about the location of underground infrastructure and what data is accessible is inaccurate, out-of-date and incomplete with the result that serious incidents during construction with injuries and fatalities occur again and again.  It is estimated that in the United States $10 billion is devoted to locating underground infrastructure prior to and during construction, but the available statistics indicate that this is not reducing the number or severity of incidents of underground utility damage.  Furthermore inaccurate and missing information about underground infrastructure increases the risk of schedule and budget overruns.  It has been estimated that this represents a $50 billion drag on the U.S. economy and upto a £6 billion drag on the U.K. economy.

Nearly every month the news carries reports of explosions caused by damage to underground utilities during construction excavation. In the last few months of this year there have been explosions in Murrieta, California (July) where a utility worker was killed and 15 others injured, downtown San Francisco (February), Durham, North Carolina (May), and I could go on. These incidents are more frequent than many people realize. 

This is not an impossible problem. A number of cities, regions and countries around the world have recognized the importance of accurate information about the location of underground infrastructure and implemented processes to reduce the risk of these events. For example, comparing the United States and Japan reveals a startling difference in the number of incidents of underground utility damage during construction. The number of incidents in the U.S. is between 400,000 and 800,000 per year (roughly one or two every minute). For all of Japan the number of incidents in 2016 was 134. Clearly something can be done to reduce the risk for construction workers and the public.

Over the years I have personally compiled information on 25 jurisdictions including airports in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific that have implemented various policies and organizational structures for sharing information about the location of underground infrastructure. These range from government mandated and implemented, government mandated and privately implemented, voluntary industry associations, and private companies. In this article I provide a synthesis of measures most of which have been implemented, are being implemented, or have undergone pilot implementations. These can be grouped in several broad categories.

• Reliable statistics on underground utility damage

• Policies, procedures, and technologies for raising the level of accuracy, timeliness and completeness of information about the location of underground infrastructure.

• Digitalizing the capture, sharing and updating of location information about underground infrastructure.

• Ensuring security and privacy of location information about underground networks including protection for competitive information. 

• Providing access to stakeholders to underground infrastructure location information throughout the construction project life-cycle from planning and design through construction to operations and maintenance.

• Liability model for sharing responsibility for costs of underground utility damage.

Airports, university campuses, and industrial campuses are characterized by a greater density of underground utilities and by more types of underground equipment( communications cables, aeronautical ground lighting cables, gas mains, low voltage electric power cables, high voltage electric power cables, storm water mains, sanitary waste water mains, potable water mains, grey water mains, fuel mains, fire fighting water mains, and a variety of underground structures.) Underground infrastructure in airports, university and industrial campuses typically has a single owner though not always.

Public jurisdictions such as national, regional, state or provincial and municipal governments are responsible for the public right of way.  Typically underground infrastructure in the public right of way involves multiple private owners; telecom network operators, electric power utilities, gas network operators, water and wastewater operators,and others such as heating and fuel transmission pipeline operators. Dealing with multiple private owners who attempt to maintain information about their network facilities typically in a GIS considerably complicates the process of acquiring and maintaining accurate location information about underground cables and pipes.

1. Reliable statistics are essential to determine the social impact of underground utility damage and to assess the effectiveness of policies, procedures and technologies designed to reduce the number and severity of incidents of underground utility damage. Every incident of damage to underground infrastructure should be reported including injuries, fatalities and direct cost. Indirect cost is a nice to have, but very difficult to estimate. Cause is difficult to determine because it depends on who is reporting the incident - network operator, the excavator, or by an independent organization.  A network operator's perspective may be that the contractor did not exercise care during excavation, whereas the contractor's perspective may be that the location of the cable or pipe as identified as a result of a one-call request was inaccurate.  Responsibility for submitting this information has to be assigned to the   One option for doing this efficiently is to classify incidents by seriousness and assign different levels of reporting based on this classification. For pipelines PHMSA assigns levels of seriousness based on cost, consequence, injuries and fatalities.  Significant incidents include any of the following: (1) Fatality or injury requiring in-patient hospitalization, (2) $50,000 or more in total costs,(3) release of significant volumes of gas or hazardous liquid. Serious incidents include a fatality or injury requiring in-patient hospitalization.  In civil aviation each serious incident is investigated by the NTSB, an impartial group of experts who determine technical cause but do not assign blame. The available evidence from the U.S. civil aviation industry, pipeline industry, and many national statistical agencies suggest incident reporting should be mandated to ensure statistically reliable data.  This entails significant penalties for not reporting incidents. Ex. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), Heathrow International Airport, Japan Construction Industry Association

2. 3D mapping of underground infrastructure prior to planning and design. Making the location of underground infrastructure available to engineers so that designers have access to not only accurate above-ground survey but also accurate below-ground location information enables engineers to avoid underground infrastructure during design. 3D maps of underground utilities also contributes to reducing unnecessary and costly utility relocation. Below-ground location information should be at least ASCE quality level B.  The entire area should be should be assessed by an SUE engineer in collaboration with utilities and telecoms with equipment in the area. The assessment may include scanning with modern remote-detection tools (EMI, GPR and inertial locating ) to raise the quality of location of all underground facilities to QL B and to identify abandoned or unknown infrastructure.  The cost of raising the quality level of facilities in the design area to B could be assigned to the relevant network operator, engineering firm or shared. For unknown and abandoned equipment an attempt should be made to find the original owner. Ex. Colorado 811

3. Locating unknown and abandoned facilities.  The current one-call system is targeted toward utilities locating their own facilities, typically based on their as-builts.  But there is no formal mechanism for locating facilities that have been abandoned or are not shown on network operator as-builts.  Requiring a full SUE survey in addition to a traditional surface survey at part of planning and design at the beginning of a construction project helps avoid surprises during construction. Ex. Colorado 811
   

4. Capturing and sharing the location of infrastructure detected as a result of a SUE survey at the beginning of a project or as the result of an information request to one-call/811.  Currently utilities are required to paint the ground and in some jurisdictions to provide a paper sketch indicating the location of underground utilities.   This information needs to be captured digitally and shared.  The objective is over time to build up a high quality (QL A and B) database of the location of underground infrastructure that can be shared.  Ex. Colorado Department of Transportation

5. Capturing and sharing the location of infrastructure exposed during construction. In the United States it is estimated that $10 billion is spent annually to locate underground infrastructure prior to and during construction.  Much of this information is not shared and the next time excavation occurs in the same area, the underground infrastructure must be located again.  If this information is captured and shared, over time a high quality (QL A and B) database of the location of underground infrastructure will be formed that will avoid locating the same infrastructure over and over again.  Alternatives for recording the location of exposed infrastructure include total station, RTK, and LiDAR, which tend to be expensive but high quality (QL A). Other alternatives are consumer photography with control points or structures with accurately known locations.  It is essential that this does not increase excavation costs for the contractor.  Contractor margins are tight and having to keep a survey crew on hand during excavation would significantly increase costs. There have been experiments by the City of Chicago, Bentley and Costain aimed at efficiently capturing location information about utilities exposed during construction.

6. An efficient process to update the information recorded in network operators' databases. Information captured as part of a SUE survey, as a result of an information request to one-call/811, or detected during excavation may differ from the records contained in network operators' databases.  For continuous improvement of the quality of the information about the location of network facilities requires an efficient way to compare and update this information.

7. Reducing or eliminating the update backlog.  Utilities regularly maintain underground infrastructure, move it as part of a construction project, or abandon it.  This information has to be reported back to the network operator to update the information in the utility GIS.  There are two dimensions to updates; the accuracy of the location information provided from the field and the update backlog, the time it takes for updates to be entered in the utility GIS.  As with the as-built backlog this backlog can stretch into months.  The objective should be better than a day. This issue can also be resolved by regulation or by a suitable liability model. Ex. Ofgem in the U.K. requires backlogs to not exceed 42 calendar days.

8. Improving the accuracy of location information for new underground infrastructure.  If all new facilities are located to survey quality, over time location accuracy will continue to improve  as older facilities are retired. Alternatives for recording the location of newly installed infrastructure include total station, RTK, LiDAR, and photogrammetry with control points or structures with accurately known locations.  Whatever the technology the result should be ASCE quality level A.  Special provision must be made for capturing the location of facilities installed using horizontal (trenchless) drilling, for example, inertial mapping of pipe networks.  Since reliable as-builts are generally a network operator responsibility - policies are required to ensure that as-builts for newly installed equipment are accurate. There are several ways to do this; legislation which enables a government or regulator to conduct QA/QC checks on submitted as-builts or a shared liability model that assigns some responsibility for subsurface utility damage to network operators whose as-builts are inaccurate or out-of-date. A  liability model would assign liability of any underground damage during subsequent excavation to the network operator if the as-built location information is incorrect. Ex. City of Calgary, Singapore

9. Reducing or eliminating the as-built backlog.  If the time it takes for as-built information to enter the utility GIS or other database from the time new infrastructure is installed is measured in months or longer, the utility GIS is not sufficently reliable for locating underground infrastructure for construction purposes.  The objective should be better than a day. This can be resolved by regulation or by a suitable liability model.  Ex. Ofgem in the U.K. requires as-built backlogs to be less than 42 calendar days.

10. Assigning a quality level based on a generally accepted quality standard to every piece of underground infrastructure. This is critical for determining the type of excavation equipment that it is appropriate to use. It can also provide the basis for a shared liability model.  Ex. ASCE 38-02 in the U.S., CSA S250 in Canada, PAS 128 in the U.K., France DICT

11. Digitalizing the capture and sharing of information about the underground.  In North America, most one-call legislation only requires marking the ground prior to the initiation of construction.  In Ontario a written record is required in addition to marking the ground. At the federal level in Canada there is legislation initiated in the Senate and that offers the alternative of the exchange of only a written record of the location of utilities mapped prior to excavation - no visit to the site to mark the ground is required. This would open the door to exchanging a digital record of the location of utilities found prior to excavation which would be much more efficient because it could obviate the need to visit the site of the proposed excavation.  However, it would also a higher quality standard for the location of underground infrastructure than is currently the practice.  Ex. ROADIC (Japan), KLIP in Flanders, KLIC in the Netherlands

12. Digitalizing the flow of information about underground infrastructure requires a generally recognized standard for sharing information about the subsurface. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is developing an underground information exchange standard, with the appropriate acronym MUDDI, that is intended to provide an open standards-based way to share information about the below ground. There are a number of data models for different types of underground infrastructure and geotechnics. MUDDI builds on and augments existing standards to create a unified model supporting multiple use cases. The MUDDI model is intended to support routine street excavations, emergency response, utility maintenance programs, large scale construction projects, disaster planning and response, and smart cities programs. 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 geotechnics; 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. This has not yet been adopted by a jurisdiction, but agencies in the U.K. (Ordnance Surevy), Singapore (Singapore Land Authority), and New York (Fund for the City of New York) are actively supporting the development of the standard.

13. Efficient information flow.  Requiring vans with locating crews from several network operators to visit the site of a proposed excavation just prior to construction to scan the ground for their facilities using EMI and GPR and mark the ground is inefficient. An on-line system that allows an engineer or contractor to go online and define a polygon enclosing the proposed excavation and then within less than a day providing access to maps of underground infrastructure in the area can save network operators time and money.  However, the effectiveness of this solution is highly dependent on the quality of the location information maintained by network operators.  In North America the current one-call system requires that underground facilities be mapped to ASCE QL B before starting construction.  An online system providing digital maps composed of utility operators' as-builts would lower the accuracy of the location information provided to contractors and in the absence of other measures would likely increase underground utility damage. Ex, KLIP in Flanders, KLIC in the Netherlands.

14. Rules for the appropriate type of excavation equipment.  Rules are required that restrict the type of excavation equipment based on the quality level of underground utilities identified by network operators.  For example if facilities have been assigned ASCE quality level C or D, only hydraulic, vacuum or hand excavation may be used.  Ex. Heathrow airport

15. Security, privacy and protecting competitive information. To enable this information to be useful in reducing the risk of underground infrastructure damage during construction it has to be shared in a secure way which respects privacy.  In particular it must protect competitive information. There are a number of organizational ways of doing this; government can mandate, implement and run the system, government can mandate but leave it to the private sector to implement and run, an industry consortium with or without government mandate can implement and run the system, regulations could require sharing this information but leave it to the private sector to implement and run, or a private company could take overall responsibility.  Around the world there are examples where each of these alternatives can be found.  The information should be available to engineers during the planning and design phases of construction projects, to contractors for use during excavation, and to organizations responsible for operating and maintaining highways and other civil structures.  Other potential use cases for this data include disaster planning and emergency response.  Ex. KLIP in Flanders and KLIC in the Netherlands, North East Underground Infrastructure Hub (NEUIH) in Newcastle, England

16. Liability model for sharing responsibility for costs of underground utility damage.  The advantage of a rule-based shared liability model that assigns varying levels of responsibility to both contractors and network operators is that it provides motivation to network operators to improve the quality of their location information about their underground infrastructure existing and new.  An example of a shared model is the following: if a network operator identifies the location of a piece of underground equipment as Quality Level A according to the ASCE 38-2 standard and an excavator hits it, the excavator would be liable for costs if the facility was where the network operator said it was, or the network operator would be liable if it wasn't.  For an excavator intending to dig in an area where there is underground infrastructure assigned to level C or D, the cost to bring all infrastructure to quality level B would lie with the network operator (as it does now with North American one-call systems). If the network operator declines to do this, the liability for any underground damage would lie with the network operator. Ex. France DICT

These measures not only can reduce the risk of underground utility damage and the associated risk to the public during construction and thereby lower insurance costs, but can also significantly reduce the cost of infrastructure construction, for example, by avoiding major utilities and reducing the unnecessary and costly moving of utilities on civil engineering projects.

Experience has shown that over time these elements can result in increasingly accurate digital representations showing the location of underground infrastructure that is available to stakeholders in construction projects including planners, engineers, contractors and facilities managers, for utility maintenance, and potentially for other use cases such as utility outage management, disaster planning, emergency response and smart city programs.

Accelerating progress in open spatial data infrastructure at the municipal level in Canada

At the SDI Summit in Quebec City Gordon Plunkett offered an interesting perspective on the penetration of open spatial data infrastructure (SDI) at the municipal level in Canada.  Local governments are traditionally responsible for local services such as safety, infrastructure, environment, and recreation that directly impact citizens' daily life. But citizens are often not aware of available services. To increase citizen engagement local governments should make their services more easy to use, understandable, and relevant by providing them in visual form via web pages and web apps.

Background

Open data has been gathering momentum among governments initially driven by United States Federal Government data being in the public domain (since 1909.) The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California state and counties, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities.  In 2013 G8 leaders (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union) signed a charter on open data.  The Ordnance Survey in the UK began releasing some of its data with open licensing as part of its OpenData initiative in 2010, but it wasn't until 2018 that the OS Mastermap was made openly available for the public and businesses to use. But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. In the U.S. Data.gov was launched in late 2009.  In 2013, President Obama issued an Executive Order making open and machine readable the new default for federal government information in the United States.

In Canada the Government of Canada announced its Open Government Action Plan in 2012.  The fundamental principle was a government-wide directive making government information and data available to the public by default. Geospatial has led the development of open data in Canada.  Of the 80,000+ datasets that are available on the federal government's open data portal, 69,000+ are geospatial. Currently in addition to the federal government eleven provinces and territories and over 60 municipalities have open data portals. At the municipal level Vancouver has been in the forefront of municipal open data - Vancouver's open data portal was initiated in September 2009.  In November 2009  the City of Toronto launched Toronto.ca/open, the City of Toronto's official beta data set catalogue, which provided open access to city data.  In January 2010 the City of Edmonton opened Edmonton's open data catalogue, which made city data including geospatial data openly available.  In 2010 Ottawa created an Open Data Ottawa site to encourage digital innovation, improved service delivery, and stimulation of economic growth.

A major motivation for open data has been government transparency.  But there is also evidence that open geospatial data contributes to the economy.  In 2008  Australia and later New Zealand commissioned studies of the contribution of spatial data to the national economy that have concluded that with appropriate government policies the contribution to the GDP, estimated to be on the order of 1%, could be doubled.  In 2015 Natural Resources Canada released the Canadian Geomatics Environmental Scan and Economic Value Study that estimated the contribution of the geospatial sector to the Canadian economy to be on the order of $21 billion.

Current state of open SDIs in Canada

Interoperability is key for an effective SDI. The inability to easily share data is a serious constraint on the value that can be derived from it. Gordon presented a simple SDI interoperability maturity matrix. Most municipalities probably fit into what he called syntactic interoperability, the ability to share data using common file formats and APIs.  Some have ventured in sharing data at the semantic level, which means recognizing content through shared data models such as the Canadian Municipal Data Model (CMDM), National Road Network (NRN), and NENA standards for 9-1-1.  A few are venturing into addressing the issue of different names for the same objects in different jurisdictions or in different disciplines.

Patterns of use for SDI include mapping and visualization, monitoring, field mobility, data management, analytics, sharing and collaboration, decision support, citizen engagement, and design and planning. 

Perhaps the top challenge for local governments, who hold the data that is most directly relevant to citizens, is making them aware of what is available and how to use is to address their every day concerns. Gordon presented some examples across Canada of interesting open data portals: Kamloops, British Columbia; Saint John, New Brunswick; Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, which have made a lot of geospatial and other data available on open portals; St Albert, Alberta which enables citizens to report broken infrastructure and track progress in resolving issues; Regina, Saskatchewan which also makes a lot of data available on an open portal; Red River Planning District, whose site is heavily used during the annual Red River flood season; Brampton, Ontario, a poster child for open data and citizen engagement; Repentigny, Quebec, which enables users to easily determine the availability of municipal services close to where they live or intend to live; Prince Edward Island Hydro, which shows current electricity outages; and Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, whose portal include a parcel map in addition to roads and other basic map layers.

I would suggest that another data layer that should be part of every comprehensive SDI and that is missing in virtually all local, provincial, and federal SDIs is accurate maps of underground infrastructure in public right-of-ways.  Not knowing the location of underground cables and pipes has important implications for citizen safety and the reliable delivery of essential services.

In summary, local governments are traditionally responsible for local services such as safety, infrastructure, environment, and recreation that directly impact citizens' daily life. But citizens are often not aware of available services.  Local government can improve citizen engagement by making their services to more easy to use, understandable, and relevant by providing them in visual form via web pages and web apps.

Geospatial + BIM interoperability essential for the development of smart cities

Integrated geospatial and BIM is increasingly being recognized as essential for full lifecycle construction and for enabling urban digital twins.  At this year's Geo Business in London the importance of integrating these technologies was asserted by several speakers.  From the perspective of developing smart cities, Hong Kong has made integrating these technologies a policy priority for its goal of becoming a smart city.

In an award winning paper at a 2011 conference organized by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century.  At that time within the UK construction company this was a radical suggestion, but since then the need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction in the construction industry.  Among the construction vendor community it was adopted by Bentley, Hexagon, and Trimble a number of years ago and in 2017 Autodesk also jumped on board, forming an alliance with ESRI.  At this year's Geo Business event in London the importance of an integrated geospatial and BIM approach in construction was recognized by several speakers.  For example, Marek Suchocki, Autodesk argued that GIS and BIM are not separate, quite a change for Autodesk compared to a couple of years ago.

Hong Kong has the highest population density (26,100 per km²) in the world.  In Hong Kong 50% of the construction industry is government providing government with a key role in moving the entire construction industry, both public and private, forward. The city is quite advanced in adopting BIM.  BIM is mandatory for projects over HK$30 million. The city has developed a BIM Data Repository prototype to allow BIM models of public structures to be shared among government departments and with the public.  BIM has been accepted for General Building Plan submission (permitting) and all of this has been done in collaboration with the Construction Industry Council (CIC).  Finally a study of BIM/GIS integration has been completed.

In his inspiring talk at Geo Business Thomas Chan, Director of Lands, Hong Kong SAR Government, asserted geospatial has to go hand in hand with BIM in creating the common spatial data infrastructure (CSDI) that will underpin Hong Kong as a smart city. As a basis for moving toward a smart city Hong Kong has adopted common spatial data infrastructure,  3D GIS city model, and open data as public policies.  The city has already initiated a pilot open CSDI data portal with over 70 data types available.   But the BIM-GIS integration study found that it is currently difficult to bring BIM models into GIS.  Thomas Chan mentioned the OGC standards CityGML and IndoorGML as essential smart city standards.  Research has shown these standards have some incompatibilities with buildingSmart BIM standards. He is strongly encouraging the geospatial and BIM communities to collaborate to ensure that BIM models submitted to the city can be easily brought into the city's CSDI.

I would suggest that the most important takeaway from this is that in addition to the now widely recognized benefits of geospatial+BIM integration for the construction industry, it is also essential for creating a common spatial data basis for smart cities.  If we cannot resolve AEC+geospatial interoperability now through collaborative work between the two communities, we will continue to be plagued by this issue for decades to come much as we have been by CAD/GIS incompatibility for the past 25 years.

Bentley open sources its web-based digital twin javascript support library

I am at the Year in Infrastructure 2018 conference in London this week.  This morning there have been some very interesting announcements relating to digital twins.  First of all Greg Bentley announced Bentley's foray into infrastructure digital twins.  iTwin Services provides cloud-based support for digital twins and integrates with ProjectWise and AssetWise.  Secondly, Keith Bentley announced what I think is Bentley's first open source project.  iModel.js, which is hosted on Github, is a javascript library to support web-based visualization and analytics for infrastructure digital twins. 

Previously Bentley used open source geospatial components to develop a new front-end for its leading road and rail asset management system AssetWise Lifecycle Information Management solution (ALIM).  Bentley also partnered with AGI to support the open source Cesium project.

Progress in the UK toward a digital twin of the underground

Productivity Growth – Output per worker (1997=100) Source: ONS

Construction productivity is a challenge in the world's advanced economies. Globally, labour productivity growth in construction has averaged only one percent a year over the past two decades, compared with growth of 2.8 percent for the total world economy. In the Unites States labour productivity in construction has actually declined.  A recent report from the UK Government Infrastructure and Projects Authority, "Transforming Infrastructure Performance", provides evidence for stagnant productivity in the UK construction industry and outlines the government's plan to address this problem including development of a digital twin.

A recent McKinsey study revealed that construction is one of the least digitized industries in the world. McKinsey Global Institute’s Industry Digitization Index combines 27 indicators to measure the digital assets, digital usage, and digital workers in each sector. Construction is among the least digitized sectors in the world, at a level comparable to agriculture and hunting. According to the McKinsey index construction comes second to last in the United States and last in Europe.  Wipro, Booz Allen Hamilton, Aconex,  Jacobs, McKinsey, Hexagon, Trimble, Bentley, Autodesk, and many others believe that the construction industry is poised for a digitization revolution and are investing heavily in technology to enable this to happen including geospatial, BIM and full lifecycle BIM, machine learning, drones, mixed reality, big data, analytics, automation and hyperautomation.  There are an increasing number of technology startups in the construction industry.  There are also promising signs of interest in underground detection and information sharing.

The Transforming Infrastructure Performance report reiterates the widely held view that the UK construction supply chain "as a whole is under‑achieving. It has low profitability and invests too little in capital, research and development and training.” Transforming Infrastructure Performance (TIP) is the UK government’s plan to increase the effectiveness of investment in infrastructure including transport and energy networks, and social infrastructure (schools and hospitals) by improving productivity in the way assets are designed, built and operated.

The Digital Built Britain program is a key part of the government’s plan to develop the UK's digital data capabilities which included developing a ‘digital twin’. In the UK it is estimated that new assets add less than 0.5% each year to the value of existing infrastructure, which highlights the importance of improving the performance of existing assets. It is expected that a national digital twin of the real world estate will help inform government decisions to maximize full lifecycle performance and benefits of assets.

A digital twin includes above and below ground assets. Key dimensions of a digital twin are location and condition of each asset. The UK has two research projects focused on the underground part of a national digital twin. Mapping the Underworld aimed at developing technology to locate in 3D all buried utility assets without excavation.  One of the key outcomes of this project was estimated direct, indirect and social costs of utility strikes during excavation by researchers at the University of Birmingham.  The second phase Assessing the Underworld focused on geophysical tools to assess the condition of buried pipelines and cables, and of the ground in which they are buried, and of the surface transport infrastructures beneath which they are buried.

Combining above and below-ground information into one national single data model/data exchange framework will provide a foundation for the development of smart cities. 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.The medium term objective is to take these concepts forward with project partners to develop new digital data demonstrator projects.

Towards a digital twin of infrastructure: on the cusp of efficient reality capture of underground utilities

Public safety is at risk whenever the location of underground infrastructure is unknown or inaccurately known. For example, in Belgium workers on a construction project rupture a high pressure gas line they did not know was in the vicinity and the resulting explosion results in fatalities and injuries.   Or a house explodes when a gas line penetrates a sewer line during trenchless horizontal drilling and an attempt is made to clear the resulting obstruction with an augur.  Or it requires hours to identify the source of an explosion in a residential neighbourhood in San Bruno, California which caused fatalities. Similar events have occurred in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Allentown, Pennsylvania, Bellingham, Washington, El Paso, Texas, Saudi Arabia and a number of other locations.

Damages and delays connected with underground utilities during construction represent at a minimum a $50 billion drag on the U.S. economy.  For example, a project in Sydney, Australia to extend a light rail transit system encountered many unknown underground utilities during construction which delayed the project by one and half years. In the U.S., a leading cause of highway construction delays is missing or inaccurate information about the location of underground utilities. To address the risk of liabilities associated with unknown or inaccurately located underground utilities, contractors regularly increase bid costs by a minimum of 10-30%. 

A digital twin of the underground would eliminate or ameliorate these issues.  Creating a digital twin requires addressing challenges.  First of all, considerable effort goes into detecting the location of underground utilities in preparation for and during construction on virtually all projects, but this data is rarely shared.  If a way could be found to share this data, not only would contractors not have to rediscover the location of underground utilities over and over again, but over time a 3D map of underground infrastructure would emerge at no significant additional cost to construction contractors.  Secondly, a technological advance is required that enables the efficient, safe and rapid capture and processing of remote sensed data to create accurate 3D maps of the underground.  Recently there have been advances in addressing both of these issues that provide grounds for optimism that we are close to being able to cost-effectively create a digital twin of underground infrastructure. 

Putting this in the context of smart cities, where data in the form of a national digital twin becomes just as important as physical assets, it is essential that a national digital twin include above and below ground assets. Fundamental to this process is rethinking value, not just the value of a finished building or infrastructure asset, but over the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset. Furthermore, managing this data cost-effectively requires finding ways to integrate data and services relating to the underground with other city data.

Why a digital twin of underground infrastructure is important

The impact of poor information about the location of underground utilities is exemplified in the Sydney Light Rail Project.  This is a $2.1 billion PPP project for a 12 km of light rail extension in Sydney, Australia to be completed by 2019. In preparation for construction a year was allocated for identifying potentially conflicting utilities in the proposed right of way. About 500 subsurface utilities were identified and scheduled for relocation. During construction a further 400 unmapped utility services were encountered. An economic impact study by an independent consulting firm estimated that the project could have been completed at least one and a half years sooner if a complete and reliable 3D map of underground infrastructure had been available at the project planning stage.

In the U.S. underground utilities are a leading causes of highway construction delays.  Almost all construction projects for buildings or infrastructure contain a design constraint: existing utilities strung overhead on visible structures or hidden underground.  The traditional strategy for the highway designer has been to ignore utilities during design. Prior to construction utilities in the areas were requested to locate any of their underground infrastructure in the proposed right of way. Utilities are routinely relocated, often at great expense, often unnecessarily and often negatively impacting budget and schedule of the construction project. A more cost-effective alternative “design-to-accommodate” is to locate utilities first and then design the highway to avoid them, but that requires reliable information about where the utilities are located. This is rarely available. Between the two alternatives of relocating utilities and designing the highway to avoid utilities whose location is poorly known designers try to find a workable compromise that meets the highway construction scope and mission, while minimizing impacts to utility facilities. If successful, this can result in substantial savings in utility relocation costs and impacts, as well as overall savings to the project budget and timeline.  A survey has found that state departments of transportation (DOTs) overwhelmingly would like to get utilities involved as early as possible to reduce project risk by determining what utility infrastructure is present in the project area and where it is located. The study found that there is a general consensus that this would help make better decisions regarding relocation versus design-to-accommodate. When comprehensive and accurate utility location data is available, better decisions can be made, and the risk of unforeseen problems due to utilities emerging during the construction phase are reduced.

According to the Common Ground Alliance (CGA), in the United States an underground utility line is hit on average every 60 seconds, that is 390,366 hits in 2016. In addition there is always the risk of injuries and fatalities. I have estimated that the total cost to the national economy is over $50 billion. The problem is a location one; we simply don't know where our underground infrastructure is.  In most municipalities in North America underground utility lines have been put in the ground not according to plan but wherever it has been easiest and cheapest to build them. As a result 2D as-builts of underground infrastructure are notoriously unreliable. Neither the local municipality or the utility network owner know the location of underground utilities.

Construction bids routinely include an added cost, which can amount to 10%-30% of the bid cost, to cover the risk associated with underground utilities. In spite of the effort in locating underground infrastructure that is part of virtually every construction project the information is rarely shared and as a result the location of the same underground utilities is often captured over and over again for different construction projects.

As a result locating underground utilities is an essential part of every construction project involving excavation and has become a major industry in the U.S. The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) which is an association of companies and practitioners in North America reports 1700 members in the U.S. and Canada. The last CGA annual conference and exhibition attracted 800 attendees and over a hundred exhibitors which gives a feeling for the size of the locate sector.

In the UK about 4 million excavations are carried out every year on the UK road network to install or repair buried utility pipes and cables. Not knowing the location of buried assets causes practical problems that increase costs and delay projects, but more importantly, it increases the risk of injury for utility owners, contractors and road users. The problems associated with inaccurate location of buried pipes and cables are serious and are rapidly worsening due to the increasing density of underground infrastructure in major urban areas. Research at the University of Birmingham has determined the direct costs of utility strikes in the U.K.

Facility	Avg cost per strike
Electricity	£ 970
Gas	£485
Telecom	£400
Fibre-optic	£2800
Water	£300-980

The researchers have found that the true costs, including indirect and social costs, associated with utility strikes is 29 times the direct cost.

In the U.S. the Common Ground Alliance reports that there were 390,366 documented underground utility hits in 2016. The average costs of the damage for each utility hit were calculated for different types of underground infrastructure.

Facility		Avg cost per damage 2016
Natural gas		$5,914.00
Telecom		$3,022.00
Electric		$4,905.00
Cable TV		$2,190.00
Water		$3,003.00
Sewer		$5,163.00
Liquid pipeline		$7,711.00
Steam		$1,800.00
Average		$4,021.00

At an average cost of $4000 per hit, the CGA estimates that the direct cost to the U.S. Economy was $1.5 billion. The CGA emphasizes that this is a conservative minimum estimate and does not include indirect and social costs such as property damage, evacuations, traffic disruption, road closures, resulting lost business, environmental impacts, lawsuits, injuries, and fatalities. If the ratio of total to direct cost determined by the researchers at the University of Birmingham is applicable to the US, it would mean that the total estimated impact of unknown or poorly located underground infrastructure on the U.S. economy is over $50 billion.

Return-on-investment of accurately mapping underground utilities

University research has put a dollar figure on the benefits of accurate location data for underground utilities.

According to a USDOT sponsored survey conducted by Purdue University in 1999, two broad categories of savings emerged from using SUE — quantifiable and qualitative savings. The Purdue study quantified a total of US$4.62 in avoided costs for every US$1.00 spent on SUE. Although qualitative savings (for example, avoided impacts on nearby homes and businesses) were not directly measurable, the researchers believed those savings were significant, and arguably many times more valuable than the quantifiable savings.

In 2004 in Canada, the Ontario Sewer and Watermain Contractors Association commissioned the University of Toronto to investigate the practice of using SUE on large infrastructure projects in Ontario. This study, entitled Subsurface Utility Engineering in Ontario: Challenges and Opportunities, determined that the average rate of return for each dollar spent on SUE services on those projects that could be quantified was $3.41.

In 2007, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation commissioned Pennsylvania State University to study the savings on Pennsylvania highway projects that used SUE in accordance with the mapping provisions of the American standard. In their unpublished report, Subsurface Utility Engineering Manual, Pennsylvania State University found a return on investment of US$21.00 saved for every US$1.00 spent for SUE when elevating the quality level of subsurface utility information using SUE.

In 2010 researchers at the University of Toronto took an in-depth look at nine large municipal and highway reconstruction projects that developed an enhanced depiction of buried utilities. Based on this analysis, a cost model was proposed that takes into account both tangible and intangible benefits. All projects showed a positive return-on-investment (ROI) that ranged from $2.05 to $6.59 for every dollar spent on improving underground utility location data.

In Europe an economic analysis of a Milan pilot project to map all underground infrastructure using ground penetrating radar for the Expo Milan 2015 site was carried out. The study found a return on investment of €16 for every euro invested in improving the reliability information of 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.

Growing private investment in infrastructure drives technology investment in construction

The need for investment in infrastructure has continued to grow. It has been estimated that some $57 trillion will be required over the next decade and a half, or an estimated $90 trillion if we want to ensure that this infrastructure is sustainable. Increasingly infrastructure projects require private investment because governments simply have less and less money for capital projects. To fill the shortfall requires private capital. Private capital in pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign investment funds amounts to over $50 trillion. Beginning in 2004 some of this money began to find its way into infrastructure investment and by 2007 private investment in infrastructure had reached $ 40 billion annually before the world financial crisis led to a cutback. Since then private investment in infrastructure has rebounded reaching nearly $80 billion in 2016.

Until recently construction has been at the bottom of the list with hunting and agriculture among industries with respect to investment in research and development.  There are signs that this is changing. In the last few years the number of startups focussed on technological innovation in construction has risen dramatically. Partly this can be ascribed to technological innovation that makes technologies such as reality capture, building information modeling (BIM), and augmented reality more accessible, but this is amplified by growing private investment in infrastructure. Private investment, unlike government investment which aims at social benefits, seeks financial returns. Whether the source of the funds is a pension fund, an insurance company, or a sovereign wealth fund, investments are expected to show a high likelihood of generating a significant financial return. This in turn drives productivity because increasing productivity of construction and operations and maintenance increases the return on investment.

Accelerating R&D into underground detection and modeling

There are indications of increased 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.  Project Iceberg, a collaborative project between Ordnance Survey (OS), British Geological Survey and Future Cities Catapult, has been created to better capture, collect and share data about underground assets and geological conditions and to find a way of sharing all this information among utility and energy companies, the transport sector, street works planners, building developers, and the construction industry.  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 has just 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.

Across Europe the SUB-URBAN COST Action (2013-17) aimed at developing relationships between experts who develop urban subsurface knowledge and urban decision makers, practitioners and the wider research community. The Action established a European network across 30 countries of Geological Surveys, Cities and Research Partners.

IDS GeoRadar Stream C

There is evidence of growing investment by major vendors in underground detection technology.  Hexagon, with revenue of $4 billion annually, acquired IDS (Ingegneria dei Sistemi) GeoRadar, an Italian company that has developed a towed multi-channel ground penetrating radar array that can collect data on underground infrastructure at faster speeds than has been possible heretofore. Since the acquisition Leica continues to release important enhancements to the software used to create 3D models of underground from the GPR scans and other information.  Furthermore a major software company, Bentley Geosystems with about $1 billion in annual revenue, has developed software specifically for managing location information about underground infrastructure. Bentley Subsurface Utility Engineering (SUE) enables users to develop 3D subsurface utility models from 2D models, resolve subsurface utility clashes, and model, analyze, and design subsurface infrastructure networks.

Recent advances in detecting and sharing location of underground utilities

Currently standard practice requires walking a lawn-mower like GPR array or hand-held EM wand along a road or right of way to detect underground utilities.  This is not only time-consuming and expensive, in traffic it is extremely dangerous.  Recently technical advances in detection were reported that bring rapid, cost-effective and safe collection of location information about underground infrastructure with no boots on the pavement closer to reality. T2 Utility Engineers, based in Whitby, Ontario have reported commercially using a multi-channel ground penetrating radar (GPR) array towed routinely at 10-12 km/hr to capture subsurface data.

Siteco rig with Sensors and Software GPR array and Faro LiDAR scanner

In a separate initiative a successful proof of concept by DGT Associates has been reported in Mississauga, Ontario in which data collected by a rig combining mobile laser scanning and GPR arrays collected data simultaneously above and below ground towed 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. In both cases no boots were required on the pavement which addresses a serious safety issue with traditional GPR and electromagnetic (EM) detection.  However, in both cases significant time was required to post-process the collected scans, combine this information with as-builts, EM scans and other information to create 3D models. Much of the post-processing work remains manual. A rough estimate is that the post-processing requires two weeks per ten kilometers.  Nevertheless, that data can be collected safely at or near roadway speeds overcomes an important hurdle in developing 3D models of underground infrastructure.  In addition improvements in software are helping to speed up the post-processing required to create 3D models.

A significant cost for virtually every construction project is detecting underground utilities prior to and during construction.  This information is rarely shared so that the information about underground utilities collected during construction is effectively lost has to be collected over and over again. There are several initiatives underway to develop ways to share information about underground infrastructure that is captured during construction.

City of Chicago, Univ of Illinois Real-Time and Automated Monitoring and Control Lab (RAAMAC) and CityZenith

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.  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. These images can be used to create an accurate georeferenced 3D map of the utilities encountered during excavation. A research project involving Costain and Bentley Systems has found that digital photography during excavation using a consumer grade smartphone can be used to create a 3D model of comparable accuracy to a laser scan survey and at much lower cost.

Recent advances in standards for locating underground utilities

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 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 (PAS) 128, 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 B3. A process to revise PAS 128 to reflect newer technical developments has just been initiated.

Three organizations have sponsored a concept development study by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for underground information with the main outcome being an Engineering Report. The sponsors of the OGC Underground Concept Development Study were the Fund for the City of New York - Center for Geospatial Innovation, the Singapore Land Authority, and the Ordnance Survey (UK).  The Engineering Report documents the progress made by the OGC and its members to build a complete situation assessment and develop a conceptual framework for action to improve underground infrastructure data interoperability. The report also identifies the most important steps to be taken next in order to develop the necessary data standards.

This led to the development of draft versions of a Model for Underground Data Definition and Interchange ("MUDDI Data Model") and an RoI (return on investment) model Cost Benefit Assessment of Subterranean Information Management. MUDDI is being developed as an interchange and integration model to support a range of critical underground infrastructure and environment information that is currently held in a wide and disparate variety of forms. To review and assess MUDDI through actual implementations, the OGC has issued a call for participation for a MUDDI Workshop to be held July of this year in New York City.

Municipal and regional mapping of underground infrastructure

Some cities and regions have realized the value of knowing where their underground infrastructure is and have required better information about the location of underground utilities.  In most cases this involves legislation requiring and implementation of a system for sharing information about underground utilities between utility and telecom companies and construction contractors.

Many years ago Tokyo developed the mainframe-based Road Administration Information Center (ROADIC) system which was deployed first in Tokyo and then in most major cities in Japan. The ROADIC system provides information about the location of underground infrastructure including telecommunications and utilities.

Sarajevo, in Bosnia, has recorded the location of all utility and telecommunications infrastructure operating in the city on paper maps for over 50 years.  The building permitting process in Sarajevo required contractors working within the city to supply coordinates of all underground infrastructure to the permitting office where they were transcribed onto paper maps.  A decade ago Sarajevo converted these maps to digital format (Oracle Spatial).

Calgary, Alberta has had the JUMP (Joint Utility Mapping Project) for many years.  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.  The maps only show location and type of infrastructure (water, gas, electric power, telecom) and owner.  Anyone excavating in Calgary can access this database.  Edmonton, Alberta also has a shared facilities mapping database. The Instituto de Información Territorial del Estado de Jalisco developed an integrated infrastructure database for the State of Jalisco.

A project of the City of Sao Paulo called GeoCONVIAS which integrates data from 20 to 30 utilities operating in the city of Sao Paulo, which is one of the World's largest cities. The most important objectives  of the ConVIAS project are to organize underground infrastructure, prevent accidents during excavation, reduce inconvenience to the public, and reduce the costs of maintaining underground infrastucture. The utilities in Sao Paulo are not asked to provide detailed information about their underground facilities, just "a simple line" showing the location of their facilities.

Rio de Janeiro has a similar project GeoVias funded by the government of the City of Rio de Janeiro and four utilties.  One of the immediate motivations for this project was "man hole explosions" apparently resulting from the close proximity of underground electrical and gas facilities in Rio.  The objectives of the project in Rio are somewhat different from Sao Paulo, apparently because the network of underground facilities isn Rio is absolutely unique, certainly in Brazil, but maybe even in the world.  The objectives of the Rio project were to reduce the risk of accidents, eliminate hazardous interaction between different networks, for example, electric power and gas and provide information about the location of underground networks for construction projects. It was hoped that the project would also speed up the process of reviewing construction permit applications, which currently can take a year to complete, and emergency repairs to underground infrastructure.

Penang, Malaysia developed an interesting approach for mapping and maintaining a database of underground facilities.  Sutra D'Bank (Penang State Government Subterranean Data Bankis a database that is maintained by a joint venture company Equarater (Penang) Sdn Bhd (EPSB) .  Sutra D' Bank's customers are utilities or any other party undertaking excavations in areas under the jurisdiction of the local government.  The operator of Sutra D'Bank does two things.  They will provide the location of underground facilities in the planned excavation area, using the Sutra D'Bank database of undergound facilities supplemented by an on-site survey using a variety of technologies.  This is similar to the service that many utilities and telcos provide,  but identifies all underground facilities, not just those of one utility or telco.  In addition, the operator of Sutra D'Bank conducts an onsite as-built survey to record the 3D position and all relevant attributes of the new installation which they then upload to the Sutra D' Bank database.  This is unique and addresses a common problem - as-designed vs. as-constructed as-builts - that many utilities and telecoms face who rely on their construction contractors for as-builts.

The remarkable Sydney Down Under project brings together utility infrastructure including water, wastewater, telecommunications, electric power, and transportation infrastructure including rail and subways, and roads and highways, together with buildings (above and below ground) including interior spaces and occupants. It was developed by the Emergency Information Coordination Unit of the New South Wales government. This project involves 200 organizations including local and state governments, utilities and the telecommunications company.  The project is focussed on emergency and disaster management. Since the information is intended for emergency response applications, its availability is restricted.

A major step forward in mapping underground infrastructure was a pilot project carried out using ground penetrating radar (GPR) on the site of the Expo Milano 2015 event in Milan. The total project area is about 230 000 square meters. All underground infrastructure including electric power, water, sewers, gas, district heating, street lighting, and telecommunication, were mapped using ground penetrating radar (GPR) which was compared to historical records.  The comparison revealed major discrepancies in the historic record including thousands of meters of unknown infrastructure. For the known infrastructure large errors of geolocation were recorded.  The other ground breaking part of the pilot project was an economic analysis of the costs and benefits of applying GPR to detect the location of underground infrastructure. The analysis estimated that the return on investment is about €16 for every euro invested in improving the reliability information of underground infrastructure.

Initiatives towards national digital twins of infrastructure

Knowing where things are underground has become important enough that in several countries around the world; France, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the U.K. initiatives to improve our knowledge about the location of underground infrastructure are already underway.

In France a nation-wide multi-billion euro project was initiated to improve the quality of the location information about France's underground utility infrastructure. A 2013 presidential decree mandates that by 2019 the location of critical underground infrastructure in urban areas will be mapped to 40 cm or better. (According to the decree critical infrastructure does not include telecommunications or water and sewers.) Furthermore by 2026 the location of all of the nation's infrastructure will be mapped to 40 cm. The decree also specifies the liability for hitting underground infrastructure that shares the responsibility between the utility owner and the the contractor depending on the precision of the information available about the underground facility.

Underground Netherlands

But more importantly, as a potential model for the cost-efficient sharing of information about the underground, the Netherlands has embarked on a national program supported by legislation and standards to expand the collection and sharing of data about the subsurface. In 2015 a new law was passed by the States General in the Netherlands which created the Basisregistratie Ondergrond (BRO) or Key Registry for the Subsurface which is open and accessible to all citizens of the Netherlands. The law mandates that if you excavate or drill you have to share your data with the BRO registry. In addition if when using the data in the registry you find something is incorrect you have to report it.  The Key Registry for the Subsurface (BRO) came into force in January, 2018. The BRO registry consists of 26 data types, which will become mandatory in installments over five years and all of which include location. On 1 January 2018,it become mandatory to report the first three data types, geotechnical surveys (CPT), groundwater monitoring wells and soil drilling sample profiles. On 26 June 2018, this data became publicly available via the Dutch open data portal PDOK.  Work is underway to implement data models for the remaining data types including cables and pipes for which the Dutch standard IMKL will be used.  All 26 will become mandatory by 2022. The information model cables and pipes (IMKL) is a Dutch standard data model for the exchange of data about underground infrastructure and is founded on the INSPIRE model for cables and pipes, in which location is specified in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) GML format.

As a result of the conjunction of the release of three UK government reports, Industrial Strategy Building A Britiain for the Future, Transforming Infrastructure Performance, and Data for the Public Good, the transformation in how infrastructure is built, managed and operated in the UK has made a national digital twin a key concept for the UK government. A national digital twin includes above and below ground assets. It is based on the foundation concept that a digital model is equally important as the physical assets.  Combining above and below-ground information into one national single data model/data exchange framework 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.

Underground Singapore: Straits Times

In Singapore the Urban Redevelopment Authority is planning to have a masterplan of Singapore's underground spaces ready by 2019. It will be released as part of the next Master Plan guiding Singapore's development in the medium term.

In the U.S. an initiative has just been started to create a national infrastructure map which would include subsurface infrastructure. In June of this year a special summit was convened at Arizona State University which included leaders in public administration, infrastructure development, geography, GIS, and data integration/open data. The objective of the meeting was to review the current state of location-based information on national infrastructure including underground, examine efforts to integrate location based data systems across jurisdictions, understand the perspective of stakeholder communities, identify strategies for more systematic access to data at the national scale, and discuss the role of government to implement such strategies.

Summary

Mapping the underground is an essential component of creating a national digital twin. Recent technical development including the ability to collect data at highway speeds that can be used to create a 3D model of underground infrastructure, software that can extract relevant 3D underground information from consumer digital photography and video capture, novel ways to share information about underground infrastructure during construction at no significant additional cost to contractors, and progress on standards for sharing information about the subsurface are bringing us close to being able to cost-effectively create a digital twin of underground infrastructure at the municipal, regional and national levels increasingly feasible.

A key motivation for 3D mapping the subsurface is the risk to construction projects of unknown or poorly mapped underground infrastructure. Every year workers and the members of the public are injured or killed as a result of unforeseen underground utility hits. Underground utilities are the number one cause of delays in highway construction projects. The economic cost to the U.S. economy of not knowing where underground utilities is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. A number of studies have concluded that the ROI of improving the accuracy of location of underground infrastructure is significant, with estimates of the benefits ranging as high as $21 for every dollar invested.

Singapore, the Netherlands and France have adopted policies leading to the development of accurate digital models of their national underground infrastructure.  Putting this in the context of smart cities, where data in the form of a national digital twin becomes just as important as physical assets, it is essential that a national digital twin include above and below ground assets. Fundamental to this process is rethinking value, not just the value of a finished building or infrastructure asset, but over the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset.  The development of a national digital twin has recently been enunciated by the UK government. In the United States an initiative has just been kicked off in March 2018 to develop a national infrastructure map including underground infrastructure.  Taken together - the public awareness of the problem, the technical advancements in underground detection in the last few years that are making cost-efficient 3D mapping of the underground increasingly feasible, and the growing recognition of the the benefits of accurate 3D maps of underground infrastructure – have led to accelerated momentum to create a digital twin of the subsurface at the municipal, regional and national levels.

National digital twin is key to the UK government's transformation of the construction industry

The conjunction of the release of three UK government reports, Industrial Strategy Building A Britiain Fir for the Future, Transforming Infrastructure Performance, and Data for the Public Good, has set the stage for a transformation in how infrastructure is built, managed and operated in the UK. National digital twin is now a key concept for the UK government and BIM and geospatial are foundational for this digital replica of the national physical infrastructure.

Mark Enzer, chief technology officer at Mott MacDonald UK and proposed chair of the Digital Framework Task Group (DFTG) which is tasked to drive these reports’ implementation forward in his keynote at Geo Business 2018 in London, explained that there will be a greater focus on existing infrastructure.  Digital abundance where the cost of everything digital has dropped dramatically over the last couple of decades has transformed many industries from banks to airlines automobile manufacturing. Construction represents about 10 % of GDP and construction productivity has plateaued over the past 40 years whereas general industrial productivity has doubled. Mark pointed out that the UK has primarily mature infrastructure to maintain and operate and construction has to change to reflect this.

Based on the concept that data in the form of a national digital twin is just as important as physical assets, digital delivery and physical delivery go hand in hand. Key to digital delivery are BIM, geospatial, a common data environment, and asset information management.  A national digital twin would include above and below ground assets.

Managing this data is about making sense of it for better decision making. Fundamental to this process is rethinking value, not just the value of a finished building or infrastructure asset, but output per ‎£ over the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset. This means moving beyond BIM Level 2 to full lifecycle BIM including operate and maintain.

A coordinated digital transformation landscape is required to achieve this digital transformation strategy for economic transformation. He sees the many organization in the UK infrastructure and construction sector coalescing around ICG, representing Highways England, Network Rail, Crossrail, Highspeed Rail 2 (HS2), Heathrow Airport and others and Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) representing the UK BIM Alliance and others to enable this to happen.  The Centre for Digital Built Britain is a partnership between the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and the University of Cambridge to deliver a smart digital economy for infrastructure and construction for the future and transform the UK construction industry’s approach to the way the UK plans, builds, maintains and uses its social and economic infrastructure.

Low cost sensor enables citizen scientists to measure and share urban air pollution data over the web

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than seven million deaths every year are linked to air pollution exposure from household and ambient (outdoor) air pollution. But in spite of these statistics the average city has only one or two air quality monitoring devices which are very expensive costing about $1.5 million each. At this year's FOSS4GNA (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial North America) get together in St Louis Steve Liang, a professor at the University of Calagary and CEO of SensorUp, described a way that citizen scientists can contribute to measuring air pollution using a low cost board and CPU and share via open source geospatial web software to map the resulting measured air pollution in real time.

Based on the latest results from WHO air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk, linked to 12% of all global deaths. Around 4.3 million deaths every year are attributed to exposure to household (indoor) air pollution, from heating, cooking and lighting using solid fuels. Around 3.7 million deaths every year are linked to outdoor air pollution , including exposure to fine particulate matter from fuel combustion from vehicles and from power plants, industry and biomass burning.

Steve described the sensors, which are typically built by interested people in workshops led by staff from SensorUp, a startup that Steve leads. The devices consist of a sensor that measures PM2.5 (particles less than 2.5 microns in size), temperature and humidity, a CPU and Wifi. Each device costs less than $100. After building the device, each participant in the workshop brings it home and installs it outside within wifi range of their internet router. The sensor reports ambient PM2.5, temperature and humidity every 5 minutes to a central server maintained by SensorUp. It uses the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard SensorThings API which provides an open and unified way to interconnect Internet of Things (IoT) devices, data, and applications over the Web. SensorUp SensorThings platform is the most advanced OGC SensorThings API implementation.

A web application built on the open source geospatial software Leaflet allows users to view the data on a map in real time, investigate air pollution historically and compare different cities. The data is open and accessible to anyone.  To date about 500 people across Canada have built their own devices and are sharing measured PM2.5. The real-time feed from these devices is mapped here.

Vancouver's strategy for zero emissions buildings by 2030

New buildings in Vancouver will be zero-emissions or zero-emissions ready by 2030 or earlier. Vancouver will achieve this by a combination of energy usage reporting, incentives to the private sector, regulation including rezoning and building code changes,and increasing public awareness about low carbon building construction and operation.

At a Canadian BIM Council (CanBIM) conference in Vancouver, Brad Badelt, Assistant Director of Sustainability at the City of Vancouver, outlined how Vancouver intends to meet the goals defined in its 2015 renewable city strategy; 100% renewable energy by 2050 and a reduction of 80% in emissions compared to 2007.

Vancouver is already 31% renewable because the electric power used by buildings is almost entirely renewable. Currently building heating relies almost entirely on natural gas. Vancouver has had electric buses for years and municipal rail (Skytrain) is electric. 57% of CO₂ emissions come from heating buildings. Currently almost half of new building floorspace in Vancouver is single family residential.

In 2050 Vancouver's building stock is projected be 30‎% built prior to 2010, 30% current or upcoming, and 40% zero emissions buildings. The more that can be done right now to move toward zero-energy-ready buildings, the less retrofitting will be required to achieve Vancouver's emissions goals.

Vancouver's strategy for achieving all new buildings being zero-emissions-ready by 2030 is multi-faceted.  It includes regulation: to gradually restrict greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reduce heat loss, and limiting total energy use; city leadership: all new city-owned buildings will be zero emissions; incentives: incentivizing the private sector to move toward zero-emissions building; and capacity building: investing in tools to develop and share knowledge and to remove barriers.  One of the things that Vancouver is doing right now is creating a Zero Emissions Building Centre of Excellence, scheduled to open in May, which is the first in Canada.  BIM and energy performance modeling will have a key role in the drive toward reduced buildings emissions.

In Vancouver's zero emissions strategy the next frontier is embodied carbon - emissions sourced to the materials and energy used in the construction of buildings. Vancouver plans to first require embodied emissions reporting followed eventually by regulation. One thing that is definitely in the works is encouraging the use of a lot more wood in construction. This is partly due to the intention to reduce embodied carbon and partly due to using the excess capacity resulting from U.S. duties on softwood imports.