Between the Poles

Key registry created in the Netherlands to help model the subsurface

Increasing urbanization throughout the world challenges the sustainable development and resilience of cities. Despite this, the importance of the ground beneath cities is often overlooked.  A lot of information about the underground is captured during excavation and drilling. But this data is typically stored in project or private databases and is not shared. Capturing this data in a shared, open database is a first step toward developing a model of the subsurface that can be reliably used for urban planning, design, construction and maintenance.  The Netherlands has recently embarked on a national program supported by legislation and standards to do just that.

At the preconference workshop “Utilizing subsurface data for urban planning, design, construction and maintenance” organized by Geodan and TNO at the GEO|Design+BIM conference in Amsterdam, Michiel van der Meulen of the COST Sub-Urban program presented an overview of a new program supported by legislation to develop and maintain an open database of information about the subsurface in the Netherlands.

Current data about the subsurface in the Netherlands comes from borehole logs, cone penetration tests, and groundwater measuring points. Most of the currently available information about the subsurface in the Netherlands comes from boreholes drilled typically to over 100 meters using light drilling equipment as well as some boreholes to much greater depths using heavy drilling equipment. This information is available for free through the DINOloket of the TNO, Geological Survey of the Netherlands.

Based on interpolating from the existing borehole data, there are several models of the subsurface in the Netherlands developed by the Geological Survey of the Nethelands. For example, there is a model of the subsurface down to 50 meters. It has a resolution of 100 by 100 by half a meter. It was intended to assist in identifying aquifers and gas fields. This is too course for city planning purposes. What an urban planner needs is much higher resolution and that will require more data.

In 2015 a new law was passed by the States General or parliament in the Netherlands creating a Basisregistratie Ondergrond (BRO) or Key Registry for the Subsurface. The law mandates that if you excavate or drill you have to share your data (relating to soils, geotechnics, and groundwater) with the registry. In addition if when using the data in the registry you find something is incorrect you have to report it. The registry is required to be open and accessible to all citizens of the Netherlands. This new registry will require new standards for recording data and there is a major effort underway in the Netherlands to develop these standards. The implementation of the new subsurface registry will begin in 2018.

The Key Registry for the Subsurface or BRO is intended to provide transparent and accessible information about the subsurface. It is subject to the government's open data policy. In addition to providing data for urban planning, design, construction and maintenance, it is intended to include an inventory of opportunities and risks relating to subsurface, provide data for sustainable water management and to support the governments goal of moving toward a carbon neutral economy at the national regional and local levels. It is also intended to reduce the costs associated with infrastructure management for soil remediation.

The overall goal is to initiate the process of organizing an information chain that will harness geological survey and city efforts in building databases and creating the necessary standards for information production about the subsurface. But to better serve cities with the subsurface information they need, Michiel van der Meulen said that we need to rethink geological mapping, rethink urban information management, and create new alliances among organizations involved in urban development. The new BRO key registry is an important first step in the process of developing models of the subsurface that can be joined seamlessly with above surface information to create the comprehensive digital twins that will be required by the smart cities of the future.

EU energy efficient building market reaches $83.5 billion in 2017

The EU has set three goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the catch phrase 20-20-20 by 2020

1. Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20% from 1990 levels by 2020
2. Increase the share of renewable energy sources in energy consumption to 20%
3. 20% increase in energy efficiency

The legislation driving the 2020 goals are the Effort Sharing Decision, Renewable Energy Directive. and the Energy Efficiency Directive. The EU is on track to meet the 20% target for 2020.  In 2015, EU emissions were already 22% below 1990 levels.  According to national projections, emissions will further decrease until 2020 and showing a significant overshoot of EU 2020 goals. 

As an example the largest member state, Germany, has about 1.7 million non-residential buildings. Of these office and administration buildings comprise the largest share(22%), retail (14%), agricultural (14%) and hotels, cafés and restaurants (13%). Public buildings of the federal, state and local Government are about 20% of all non-residential buildings by floor area.  Efforts to reduce energy consumption in buildings 2000 to 2012 resulted in a decline in space heating consumption from 205 kWh/square meter/year in 2000 to 147 kWh/square meter/year in 2000 in 2012.  The central goal of the German Federal Government is to further reduce the heating requirements of new and existing buildings to achieve a nearly carbon neutral building stock by 2050.

Under the Paris agreement, the EU has agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030. In addition, the EU also has targets for renewable energy and energy savings of at least 27% by 2030. The Paris Agreement obliges the EU to review  its legislation to achieve the 2030 targets before 2018 when world leaders will gather to assess progress in its implementation.  According to Member States' projections based on existing measures, in 2030, the total EU emissions are estimated to be 26 % below 1990 levels.  Therefore, new mitigation policies are being put in place so that the EU target of at least a 40 % domestic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 in reached in 2030.  A 2017 survey has found that nearly 90% of EU citizens believe it is important for their national government to provide support for improving energy efficiency by 2030.

Energy efficient buildings have been one of three priorities in the EU to meet 2020 emissions goals and this will be intensified to meet the 2030 goals. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), have been the legislative drivers for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. In Western Europe intelligent building technologies and net zero energy buildings are key to meeting energy efficiency goals. A new Navigant Research report analyzes the market for energy efficient building technologies in Western and Eastern Europe with a focus on HVAC, lighting, building controls, water efficiency, water heating, and building envelope. According to Navigant Research, energy efficient building technology spending in Western and Eastern Europe reached $83.5 billion in 2017. It is projected to grow steadily to $111.9 billion by 2026.

Progress in advancing integrated BIM+geospatial standards for infrastructure

There has been impressive progress in developing open standards for the integration of geospatial and AEC (architecture, engineering and constcruction) views of city infrastructure which provides a standards-based basis for full-lifecycle management from design through to operations and maintenance of infrastructure projects.

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Nigel Clifford, CEO of the Ordnance Survey, described a project that is intended to create a smart city model for four square kilometers of Manchester called cityverve.  The objective is to apply Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to a real city.  It is supported by Manchester City Council, Manchester Science Partnerships, the University of Manchester, Ordnance Survey, Cisco, BT and other tech players and well as government and Innovate UK.  It is intended to provide an open platform of platforms.  Among the fundamanental things that will be required to do this is open standards for modeling city infrastructure and to make this accessible to the geospatial and AEC communities.

Years ago private Dutch engineering and construction companies began adopting an integrated geospatial/BIM approach to construction.  I blogged previously about the firm Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult that adopted integrated BIM and GIS because many of its projects require full life-cycle BIM.  At the first GeoBIM conference in Amsterdam, Jothijs van Gaalen gave some real world examples of Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) highway construction that included GIS+BIM integration. BAM's motivation for investing in BIM+GIS are market developments especially more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project.   As another example, ARCADIS Netherlands has delivered a number of projects that integrate geospatial into the design process.

The Netherlands has also led in the development and application of open BIM/geospatial standards‎ in the construction industry including NL/SfB, BS&I, ETIM, CB-NL, IMGeo, CityGML, NLCS, GB-CAS, COINS, IFC, VISI, SALES, National Model BIM Protocol, and National Model BIM Implementation Plan.  The Netherlands has created a BIM Loket (BIM Gateway) that is intended to be a national portal for information about BIM and open BIM standards in the Netherlands including related geospatial standards. 

In the AEC world Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) are the open and neutral data format standard for the exchange of building information models (BIM) that is widely used in the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction)  sector.  The IFC standard was developed and is supported by buildingSMART International.  The IFC BIM standard is used in the construction industry in many countries and is mandated in some such as Finland.  The first versions of IFC were intended for buildings (vertical BIM).  Recently buildingSMART initiated the IFC for Infrastructure project to extend the IFC standard to support linear transportation infrastructure (horizontal BIM or BIM for Infrastructure) such as rail, road, bridges, and tunnels. 

In the transportation infrastructure world the widely used LandXML standard, which is supported by  800 members in the roads and highway transportation sector, includes alignment, road, rail, survey, terrain, land parcels, drainage, wastewater, and water distribution systems.  LandXML is not associated with a recognized international standards organization and has had limited support for the past few years. 

In the geospatial world a widely used international geospatial standard for cities is CityGML.  Thomas Kolbe and co-workers are the developers of the CityGML standard that has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium.  Kolbe et al. are translating a vision of the city as an interactive system comprised of functional components, utility networks connecting components, and interdependencies between utility networks into standards-based intelligent models that can be used to analyze urban environments for a variety of purposes including risk- and disaster management energy consumption, carbon balancing and city life-cycle management.

Currently CityGML includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance for urban environments. CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions, called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs).  There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains.  For example,  I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks.  The INSPIRE Data Specifications Annex III contains use case encodings and a data model for Buildings the development of which was strongly influenced by CityGML. There have been attempts to integrate or at least develop a mapping between IFC and CityGML. 

The major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016.  LandInfra  was developed by Bentley Systems, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International and provides a unifying basis for land and civil engineering standards including the OGC's InfraGML and buildingSmart International's IFC for infrastructure standards.  

buildingSmart International's IFC-Alignment project uses this common conceptual model of alignments for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges.  The objectives of the IFC-Alignment project is to enable the exchange of alignment information through the full infrastructure lifecyle from planning through design and construction to asset management. A Candidate IFC-Alignment Standard is open for review now.

InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities. InfraGML supports a subset of the existing LandXML standard. InfraGML is comprised of several parts;

• Part 0: LandInfra Core Encoding Standard
• Part 1: LandInfra Land Features Encoding Standard
• Part 2: LandInfra Facilities and Projects Encoding Standard
• Part 3: LandInfra Alignments Encoding Standard
• Part 4: LandInfra Roads Encoding Standard
• Part 5: LandInfra Railways Encoding Standard
• Part 6: LandInfra Survey Encoding Standard
• Part 7: LandInfra Land Division - Encoding Standard

The Candidate OGC InfraGML encoding Standards was released for public comment in January of this year.  In April the Candidate OGC InfraGML 1.0: Part 7 – LandInfra Land Division - Encoding Standard was released.

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Phil Jackson of buildingSmart UK and UK Representative Infrastructure Room provided an update on the progress in extending IFC for infrastructure based on a common BIM/geospatial conceptual model;

• Linear alignments for road and rail - under deployment testing
• Common infrastructure architecture - developed jointly with OGC
• IFC for rail - an initial Chinese specification has been published
• IFC Bridges - just started

and several more are in active planning or ready to start;

• IFC for ports and harbours - starts this summer
• IFC for roads - ready to start
• IFC tunnel - planned

Thus it appears that building geospatial and AEC standards for transportation and land management based on a common conceptual model and developing in parallel is well advanced.

Low carbon climate-resilient infrastructure requires private funding

A Report by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate has recommended that since more than 60% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are sourced from the world's existing stock of infrastructure, ensuring infrastructure is built to deliver sustainability is the only way to meet the COP21 goal  of keeping warming below 2°C and to guarantee long-term, inclusive and resilient growth. Infrastructure underpins core economic activity and is an essential foundation for achieving inclusive sustainable growth.  Investing in sustainable infrastructure is key for reigniting global growth and reducing climate risk.

The Global Commission is chaired by former President of Mexico Felipe Calderón and co-chaired by the climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern.

The report estimates that $90 trillion in sustainable infrastructure investment will be required over the next 15 years.  It stresses that this will require a shift in the world's construction and financial sectors to ensure that this money, which will be increasingly private, is spent on low-carbon, energy-efficient projects. 

Change in infrastructure spending required for a 2°C scenario (percentage change in expenditure over 2015-2030 compared to Business-as-usual)

The report has adopted a broad definition of infrastructure which includes both traditional types of infrastructure; energy, public transport, buildings, water supply, and sanitation and also natural infrastructure; forest landscapes, wetlands and watershed protection.  Infrastructure underpins core economic activity and is an essential foundation for achieving inclusive sustainable growth. It is indispensable for development and poverty elimination, as it enhances access to basic services, education and work opportunities, and can boost human capital and quality of life.

Investment is needed to replace ageing infrastructure in advanced economies and to accommodate higher growth and structural change in emerging market and developing countries. This will require a significant increase globally, from the estimated US$3.4 trillion per year currently invested in infrastructure to about US$6 trillion per year. The Global Commission found that it does not need to cost much more to ensure that this new infrastructure is compatible with climate goals, and the additional up-front costs can be fully offset by efficiency gains and fuel savings over the infrastructure lifecycle.

Importance of private infrastructure financing

Transforming the financial system and its intermediaries is essential to scaling up sustainable infrastructure finance.  Public finance and investment will continue to play a critical role, particularly in low-income countries.  But large amounts of private capital are needed and this will only flow if the right market signals are present within the financial system. The report suggests that reforms are needed in the financial regulatory system as well as other policy reforms, specifically, to price carbon to level the playing field between sustainable and unsustainable options in order to encourage private investment in sustainable infrastructure.

Private investment requires financial returns.  Efficiency in construction and operation and maintenance of infrastructure is essential. Increasing productivity drives technological innovation. Many governments as well as private sector engineering and construction firms have identified building information modeling (BIM) as a key foundation for increasing construction productivity.  Owners are beginning to recognize the benefits of full lifecycle BIM especially when augmented by geospatial technology.

Energy

The report estimates that energy infrastructure will require investment of US$25 trillion, or nearly a third of total core infrastructure investment over the coming 15 years. In addition energy efficiency will require investment of about the same magnitude.  Building sustainable energy infrastructure encourages economic growth, reduces air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and plays a key role in building resilience.

Energy efficiency

The report found that energy efficiency is a highly cost-effective way to manage demand and reduce the investment requirements for overall energy supply. Increasing energy efficiency in industry, buildings and transport could achieve up to half of the emission reductions needed globally to peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 according to the IEA.  Energy efficiency investments in IEA member countries since 1990 have avoided US$5.7 trillion of energy expenditure.  The IEA estimates further investments could boost global GDP by US$18 trillion by 2035, increasing growth by as much as 1.1% per year.  Energy efficiency measures are estimated to create up to three times as many jobs as fossil fuel supply investments per dollar of investment.

A key recommendation of the Global Commission’s 2015 report was to scale up commitments by development banks working with governments and the private sector to invest at least US$1 trillion per year by 2030 in clean energy, including energy efficiency.

Air pollution

Outdoor air pollution, much of which is associated with fossil fuels, is linked to nearly 4 million premature deaths per year. In China, it is estimated that air pollution killed around 1.6 million people in China in 2013. In India, the air pollution toll in 2013 stood at 1.4 million deaths.  In Europe, coal plant emissions account for more than 18,200 premature deaths, about 8,500 new cases of chronic bronchitis, and over 4 million lost working days each year.  Analysis for the Global Commission shows that the health and mortality burden of air pollution amounts to as much as 4% or more of GDP in some countries. Recent analysis by the OECD has found that globally air pollution-related healthcare costs alone are projected to increase from US$21 billion in 2015 to US$176 billion in 2060.

Cities

It is estimated that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities, and over 70% of the global demand for infrastructure over the next 15 years is expected to be in urban areas.  How cities develop is important both for growth and for climate change.  The report emphasizes that investment in sustainable infrastructure is essential to make cities inclusive, safe, and resilient.

Global Commission

The global commission is supported by governmental and private sector leaders: Sharan Burrow, General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Australia; Suma Chakrabarti, President, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD); Helen Clark, Administrator, UN Development Programme (UNDP); Former Prime Minister of New Zealand; Jamshyd Godrej Chairman and Managing Director, Godrej & Boyce Mfg Co. Ltd., India; Stuart Gulliver, Group Chief Executive, HSBC Holdings plc and Chairman of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited; Angel Gurría, Secretary-General, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); Chad O. Holliday, Chairman, Shell, United States; and Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Finance Minister of Indonesia

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Smart energy for smart cities market to reach $20.9 billion by 2024

Urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon.  According to the World Bank, 54 percent of the world's population lives in urban areas today.  By 2045, the number of people living in cities will increase by 1.5 times to 6 billion, adding 2 billion more urban residents.  With more than 80 percent of global GDP generated in cities, urbanization can accelerate economic development, but it has to be managed in a way that decreases energy intensity (energy per unit of GDP).  

Smart city technology is becoming an essential element in the development of the world's megacities.  For example, the new Indian government's budget includes an allocation for initiating the development of 100 smart cities.  Songdo IDB in Korea and Fujisawa in Japan are two smart cities already under development. China has 36 smart cities in development and a low carbon model city in Tianjin.  Singapore plans to become a smart nation by 2015.  Iskandar is Malaysia's first smart city.  The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) incorporates smart city concepts. 

According to a recent report, the global smart cities market is forecasted to grow from $410 billion in 2014 to $1.1 trillion by 2019 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5%.  This includes smart homes, intelligent building automation, energy management, smart health, smart education, smart water, smart transportation, smart security, and related services.  Most of this activity is expected to occur in Asia and the Middle East.

Technologies and trends such as smart cities, smart grids, sensor webs, the Internet of Things (IoT), facilities and asset management, indoor and outdoor navigation, energy performance modeling and real-time, “big data” analytics are important for urban planners.  In these technology domains, open standards encourage the sharing of information. The OGC Urban Planning Domain Working Group intends to discover requirements for open spatial standards in information systems involved in the planning, design, use, maintenance and governance of publicly accessible spaces.

According to the IPCC urban areas accounted for 67 – 76 % of energy use and 71 – 76 % of energy-related CO2 emissions in 2006.  Cities are going to have to adopt a leading role in transforming to efficient, non-carbon energy, if we are going to be able to achieve a sustainable level of economic development. 

In preparation for COP21 in Paris, all of the major developing nations have committed to decreases their energy intensity. For example, India has just released its commitments (INDC) to reducing emissions prior to the Paris COP meeting.  The challenge for India is tackling climate change while at the same time improving the standard of living of its third of a billion poor.

According to Navigant worldwide 96 cities that have committed to becoming 100% renewable.  These include Vancouver, Canada and San Francisco, California.  According to the annual ranking by the Global Green Economy Index (GGEI) Vancouver is the world's fourth greenest city.  According to the GGEI the top three greenest cities are Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Stockholm.  The countries corresponding to these cities (Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden) also rank high, in the top 5 country rankings.  Canada is 12th. The Nordic cities have achieved their high standing with the help of their respective national governments, whereas Vancouver has achieved its high green ranking on its own with little help from the federal government.  Two years ago the Dutch Ministry of the Interior initiated a joint project with the Municipal government of The Hague (Den Haag) to reduce and stabilize energy usage and costs in downtown Den Haag.  The study area is roughly about a square kilometer where the buildings are large and owned for the most part by the National and Municipal governments.

Most of the world's electric power utilities have adopted a smart grid strategy at some level.  This can involve distributed renewable energy (DER), reduced emissions from existing fossil fuel generation and various energy efficiency programs.   Navigant Research has just released a report that investigates the fundamental shift in the way cities manage energy and their relationship with electric power utilities.  It focusses on DER, demand management, EV vehicles and charging infrastructure and energy efficiency.   The major technology suppliers according to Navigant  are ABB, Accenture, AT&T, Cisco Systems, Hitachi, Huawei, Itron, Oracle, S&C Electric Company, SAP, Schneider Electric, Siemens, SSN, and Toshiba.

Navigant Research projects that the global smart energy for smart cities technology market will grow from $7.3 billion in annual revenue in 2015 to $20.9 billion by 2024.  That represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4%. 

It should be noted that this analysis does not include energy efficient buildings the market for which Navigant has estimated in a separate study to be $307.3 billion in 2014 growing to $623.0 billion in 2023.

One third of Be Inspired Awards involve mapping, managing, rehabbing and replacing aging infrastructure

Worldwide there is increasing demand from building and infrastructure owners for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a building or infrastructure. This represents a distinct break with the design/build tradition which has dominated construction for years.  At the Year in Infrastructure conference in London, a dominant theme was the growing recognition of the importance of full lifecycle management of infrastructure.  I found it symptomatic of the direction of the construction industry that fully one third of the 54 finalists for the annual Be Inspired Awards involved mapping, rehabbing, retrofitting, replacing and managing existing infrastructure.  This is my classification of these Be Inspired finalists;

Be Inspired Finalists

1 Full lifecycle workflow
2 Replacement
7 Renovation, rehab, retrofit
3 Mapping existing infrastructure
1 Historic site protection
5 Utility asset management

Full life cycle management

Patrick MacLeamy, Chairman of buildingSMART and CEO of HOK, has been pushing a very simple message about the U.S. construction industry for years.  Buildings are too expensive, are too inefficient to operate and maintain, and don't last long. As a result the U.S. construction industry is falling behind the Nordic countries, the U.K. and Singapore.  His solution is a full life cycle approach to construction.  Information has to be shared between owners, designers, contractors, operations and facilities management over the entire life cycle of the building or infrastructure.

Buildings

Over 50% of the cost of maintaining a building is operations and maintenance which is comprised of administration, maintenance and repairs, and restoration projects.  In several countries BIM has become essential for design and construction.  But many including the UK government believe that the full value of BIM can only be found during the operational life of the building where the majority of the life cycle costs occur.  The UK government has said that "the 20% saving refers to CapEx cost savings however we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle".

Road and highway infrastructure

Highway construction is being transformed, due in part to the arrival of autonomous vehicles.  I've blogged about the startling (at least to traditional construction contractors) vision of the future of highway construction of the Chief of Surveys at the Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) which targets the full lifecycle of highway assets from planning through design and construction and operation and maintainenance.  Some large construction projects are already being designed, built and operated and maintained with a full lifecycle perspective.

Utility infrastructure

Industry surveys report that up to 80 percent of a utility's resources and budget can be spent on operating and maintaining existing utility infrastructure.   Surveys also show that aging utility infrastructure is a top priority for most utilities.

Be Inspired Awards: Mapping, Monitoring, Rehabbing, and Replacing Infrastructure

One of the projects focused specifically on full lifecycle data management for highway construction.  The project, which was submitted by the Roads Directorate, Denmark, is for the $ 580 million 39-kilometer Herning – Holstebro highway which includes eight interchanges, four railway crossings, and five bridges.  The important achievement of the project was to create a digital workflow with meaningful requirements for sharing data among disciplines and across the entire project lifecycle.  The project was a finalist for the year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Roads.

Seven of the finalists' submissions involved renovation, rehabbing, and retrofit.  An outstanding example of a rehab project is the Bond Street to Baker Street Tunnel Remediation Project.  This is a London Underground  project in the UK.  It involved the replacement of the existing elastoplastic concrete lining of a 215-meter tunnel segment on the Jubilee Line with a spheroidal graphite iron lining - all while the line was running at full capacity.  This achievement won this year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Rail and Transit at the Year in Infrastructure 2015 conference.

Two of the finalists' projects involved replacement. An example of a replacement project was the Decommissioning and Replacement of Del Rio Bridge on US 20  this was carried out by Harper-Leavitt Engineering for the Idaho Transportation Department with minimum disruption to traffic.

Five of the finalists submitted projects that involved monitoring and extracting more value from existing transportation and utility infrastructure including rail, electric substations, electric and water and waste water distribution networks.

An example is a project submitted by SA Water which won the Be Inspired Innovation in Asset Performance Management Award.  The project involved integrating a hydraulic model and an operational analytics tool with network sensors to help them optimize their network.  These tools enable them to optimize chlorine dosing for different water sources (runoff, desalinization, rivers), minimize electric power costs, and improve water quality by mapping water age across their entire network. SA Water have not only been able to reduce their power bill by A$3 million, but also have cut their network operating costs by nearly a A$ million.  It has also resulted in improved water quality.  More fundamentally it has given them much greater insight into sources of revenue and the costs of various aspects of operating a water network.

Four of the finalist projects involved mapping and historic site protection.  An example is a gas main project submitted by Utility Mapping Services Inc.  This project involved creating a 3D map of underground utilities along a stretch of highway with complex utility infrastructure woven through dense commercial and residential areas with limited right-of-way and heavy traffic congestion.  Most critically from a safety perspective, there were no utility strikes on the project.  As a result the 3D model is credited with reducing construction time from 10 to 7 weeks.  Most importantly from a budget perspective, there were no change orders and the total cost of the project came in at 10-15% less than estimated in the absence of a 3D model.

Another example is a project submitted by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA).  Singapore intends to be the world's first "smart nation".  Part of this initiative involves developing a virtual Singapore that is intended to be the source of authoritative information about Singapore for use by government agencies.  The project involves capturing large amounts of data using multiple rapid mapping technologies including oblique imagery, airborne laser scanning, mobile laser scanning, and terrestrial scanning.  The data has been compiled into 3D city model in a single database repository which includes geometry, topology, semantics and appearance.  The database relies on CityGML, a standard managed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), for the database schema and for data exchange.  The total volume of data is more than 50 terabytes. The database is open and accessible to all government agencies. The most challenging part of the project has been the development of business processes and technologies for ensuring the data remains current.  At the the Year in Infrastructure conference in London the SLA the won the annual Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3D Cadastre

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

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

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

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

BIM IFC and CityGML

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

Energy modeling for cities

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

Be Inspired Awards at Year in Infrastructure 2015: Creating a 3D cadastre for Singapore

Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany and Malaysia are on the leading edge of creating and maintaining 3D cadastres for their respective countries. 

A 3D cadastre is in the cards for Singapore for several reasions;

1. Land developers are being very creative and packaging complex volumetric parcels both underground and above ground.  
2. Current survey techniques cannot capture accurate 3D coordinates.  
3. The current 2D GIS used to capture and store cadastral information is unable to represent volumetric parcels.
4. All strata boundaries are not in the cadastral GIS, making it impossible to perform effective spatial planning for national development goals.

Underground space is heavily used and underground density is increasing.  Underground lots are getting very close to each other and accurate delineation of boundaries is required.

At the the Year in Infrastructure conference in London the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) is one of the finalists for the annual the Be Inspired Awards.  The SLA submission describes a SGD 8 million government initiative to create and maintain a high-resolution 3D map of Singapore, more than 700 square kilometers, which is the first step in the development of a 3D cadastre for Singapore.  Maintaining a 3D cadastre requires multi-user access to the 3D city model with secure processes for updating the 3D parcel mesh of the city.  It also requires maintaining accurate historical records of all changes to 3D property boundaries.

The project involved capturing large amounts of data using multiple rapid mapping technologies such as oblique imagery, airborne laser scanning, mobile laser scanning, and terrestrial scanning.  The data was compiled into 3D city model in a single (Oracle Spatial) repository. The total volume of data is more than 50 terabytes. The most challenging part of the project was the development of business processes and technologies for ensuring the data remains current.

INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum 2015 program released

INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum 2015, a joint conference organized by the European Commission and Geospatial Media and Communications, has made available its full conference program. Almost 500 presentations are scheduled on topics including building information modelling (BIM), open data, big data analytics, open standards, linked data, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Earth observation, indoor positioning, land information systems for smart cities, urban resilience and sustainability, health, agriculture and others.  Some 2000 delegates are expected to attend from more than 80 countries.  Top sponsors include Trimble, Topcon, ESRI, Digital Globe, Oracle and Bentley.

The theme of the conference is CONVERGENCE: Policies + Practices + Processes via PPP with a focus on improving coordination among policy-makers, technology providers and users.  Including geospatial data and technology in construction, agriculture, health and other industry workflows is an enabler for more successful public–private partnerships (PPP) by facilitating more informed decision making among the stakeholders.