Between the Poles

Convergence of BIM and geospatial contributes to better management of information

Dr Anne Kemp, Director and Fellow, Atkins, Vice-Chair of BuildingSmart, UK, Chair of ICE BIM Action Group, and Chair of BIM4Infrastructure UK, has published very thought-provoking insights into how the convergence of BIM and geospatial can contribute to the better management of information to help generate the understanding to make better decisions.

Her first assertion “So, let’s put paid to the hang-ups of what is and is not GIS and BIM, and discover what really deserves our focus” is a very good place for all of us to start if we are going to tear down the discipline boundaries that are inhibiting us from moving to a more holistic approach to problem solving in the era of smart cities.

Better outcomes, not BIM or geospatial

Her goal is not to support BIM or geospatial per se, but to use these technologies to improve outcomes.  From Anne's perspective the key outcomes we should be aiming at are

• CLARITY - Clarity of delivery
• TECHNICAL JUDGEMENT - Converging information production with sound engineering judgment and design
• ACCESS - Wider, faster access to comprehensible and integrated information
• LATERAL THINKING - Enabling reflective, adaptive thinking to incorporate whole life and integrated systems approach within the wider geographic context
• INNOVATION - Harnessing innovative technologies and harvesting intelligence from big data
• DECISIONS - Fostering instinctive, but rigorous collaboration and better decision making

Data, not documents

The construction industry is based on documents such as drawings. Documents lock data up within a discipline and prevents the wider access that can be used to build up an integrated view of an asset. In contrast digital data can be used, many times, for different purposes, by different disciplines.  This requires interoperability and the ability to map semantics across different disciplines.

Assets, not projects

The full lifecycle view of a building, road or airport requires thinking of assets not projects. Anne's perspective is that this is where the convergence of BIM with geospatial provides the biggest benefits. The UK government would agree. The short term objective of the UK Government BIM mandate is to reduce the cost of construction (design, tender, build) by 20%.  The longer term objective is by 2025 to reduce the costs associated with designing, building, operating and maintaining buildings and infrastructure by a third.  ‘In-use’ data from facilities management (FM) systems, building management  systems, and sensors including smart phones provides information on how an asset is actually serving the needs of people, and the patterns of behaviour of people using the infrastructure.  This information can be used to optimize building or infrastructure design. A geospatial perspective enables this data to be used not only with individual buildings or infrastructure, but for a whole neighbourhood, town or city.

Data ethics

Ensuring that data is not manipulated to distort decision making is critical to enabling the true data-driven organization of the future. Anne's perspective is that the industry is becoming increasingly dependent on data management professionals. This will require standards and a code of ethics to address challenges of privacy, distortion, and manipulation so as to ensure that data is made available in a way that aids rather than confuses decision making. In the future chief data officers and other information professionals will have even much greater responsibilities - they will be responsible for specifying, collecting, and analyzing the information for decision making that will be critical to the organization's success, even its existence.

Information is not understanding

Malcolm Gladwell in "Blink" points out that “We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

At a recent BIM conference the term “infobesity” came up more than once. A decade ago people were concerned about not having enough data to make informed decisions. Now that we have more data being collected by sensors such as smart meters and smart phones, the problem is how do we make sense from the huge volumes of data that all these smart devices are collecting.

Anne makes the point that when managed correctly, “instant” decisions based on a small amount of data are not just as good, but can be better than those made after analyzing all available data. The "less is more" challenge is to distill the data to just the right subset to enable you can make better decisions faster with less data. Anne believes that this will require more sophisticated visualization techniques to enable insights from patterns in large amounts of data and better collaboration technology to enable a large number of individuals from different disciplines to understand each other (even when using different terms for the same piece of equipment or construction material) and to collaborate fruitfully.

This means that we will be asking our human or computer information  engineers to deliver that essential subset of information to the right people at the right time, and in an intuitively understandable way.  Anne suggests that our cartographic and GIS heritage of creating, analyzing and visualizing a view of the physical world as maps may provide a model for future data managers.  But, as Anne points out, this will have to be transformed for a virtual environment.

Unintended consequences

Anne's final point is often overlooked. BIM, geospatial, augmented reality and other technologies are transforming how we view "reality".  There are very real consequences for people working in a virtual world. Anne mentions the first case of internet addition disorder (IAD) involving Google Glasses on October 14, 2014 and asks how many of us are already there with our smartphones and tablets ?

Smart cities market forecasted to reach over $ 1 trillion by 2019

Urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon.  Smart city technology is becoming an essential element in the development of the world's megacities.  For example, the new Indian government's just released 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 the report "Smart Cities Market - Worldwide Market Forecasts and Analysis (2014 - 2019)", published by MarketsandMarkets, 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.

Navigant Research forecasts that cumulative global investment in smart city technologies, including smart grid, advanced water monitoring systems, transportation management systems, and energy efficient buildings, could total $174.4 billion from 2014 to 2023, growing from $8.8 billion annually in 2014 to $27.5 billion in 2023.  Navigant forecasts that annual smart city technology investment in Asia Pacific will increase from $3.0 billion in 2014 to reach $11.3 billion in 2023.

What are cities already doing ?

In a recent study by Arup and University College London, Delivering the Smart City, the researchers analysed the spending patterns of eight U.K. cities; Leicester City Council, Manchester City Council, Leeds City Council, Portsmouth City Council, Sheffield City Council, Liverpool City Council, Bristol City Council and Coventry City Council.  These are medium-sized cities with populations between 200,000 and 760,000. 

This type of analysis has become much easier because of the open data movement in the U.K. which has generated significant amounts of accessible  data about government spending and procurement.   The analysis showed that the eight cities were spending on average 6% of their expenditure on information technology (IT). That's an average of £23 million a year on IT.  Four of the eight spent between 8 and 10% of their budgets on IT. To put this in context the proportion that these city governments are spending on IT is more than many industries and is comparable to the banking and financial services industry which spends on average 8% of operating expenditure on IT.

This research shows that cities are already investing a significant amount on something which is a foundation for smart city technology.  IT already underpins many services offered by city governments today including public security and health, transportation, public works, natural resource management, and permitting and licensing.

Other research also shows that city governments globally are spending a significant proportion of their budgets on IT.  Gartner analysed the IT spending patterns of 99 local governments across 80 countries in the U.S. and found that that IT accounted for 3.8% of their total operating expenses.  U.S. local governments, including 3,200 counties and 19,000 cities, spent approximately $34 billion on traditional IT goods and services in 2013. 

According to Gartner national and regional governments in the Middle East and North Africa will spend US $12.2 billion on IT products and services in 2014, up 1.3 % from 2013. This includes internal services, software, IT services, data center, devices and telecom services.  Saudi Arabia is investing in various digital government initiatives including King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC).  The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is planning multiple smart cities.

City governments are not the only organizations providing IT services to support city operations.  For example, installation of 5,000 smart meters in homes and businesses across London involved investment from private companies including EDF Energy, Siemens, Logica, as well as the electricity transmission and network operators, National Grid and U.K. Power Networks, the transport operator Transport for London, and the city government Greater London Authority.

The U.S. spending analysis also showed that local governments, in addition to more traditional IT products and services, are procuring cloud-based services to modernize citizen services and reduce operational costs.  An example is online portals for tax collection and business licensing.  These IT projects are usually part of wider modernization projects being carried out within departments rather than standalone technology initiatives at the city level.

UK city governments buy IT products and services from large vendors

City governments in the U.K. tend to purchase their IT products and services from large vendors.  According to the UK analysis of eight cities large and middle-sized vendors accounted for the overwhelming majority of IT spending (98%) with small businesses only accounting for 2%.

Multi-disciplinary interoperability standards for the convergence of BIM, 3D and geospatial

At the ISO/TC 59 Plenary Week in Toronto this week, a day long collaboration session was organized by ISO/TC 59, buildingSMART, and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).  This is a major milestone for the development of standards as a foundation for the convergence of building and civil engineering design and geospatial technology. 

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is an independent, non-governmental membership organization and the world’s largest developer of voluntary International Standards. ISO, which is made up of 165 member countries with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, has published more than 19 500 International Standards covering almost every industry, from technology, to food safety, to agriculture and health care.

BuildingSMART International (bSi) cooperates with ISO.  Specifically it has liaisons with two ISO committees; ISO/TC 59 (Buildings and civil engineering works) and ISO/TC 59/SC 13 (Organization of information about construction works).  BuildingSMART's main standard Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), which is a standard for sharing BIM in the construction and facility management industries, was adopted as an official ISO standard in 2013 as ISO 16739:2013.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) develops publicly available geospatial interface standards. OGC Standards enable interoperable location-aware solutions for the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT.  Over the years, the OGC has been building a network of alliance partner organisations, many of whom are standards development organizations in market domains related to the built environment.  One of these alliances is with buildingSMART which has an official memorandum of understanding (MOU) with OGC to co-operate. Recently the joint effort has focused on using BIM for Infrastructure and requirements for interoperability between BIM and Geospatial domains.

In 2008/2009 the AECOO-1 Testbed, which was led by the Open Geospatial Consortium  and the buildingSMART alliance, looked at streamlining interoperable communications between parties in the conceptual design phase to get an early understanding of the tradeoffs between construction cost and energy efficiency. Major achievements from the AECOO Testbed include delivery of BIM through open web services (OWS) for multi-disciplinary interative design analysis in real time. [George Percivall personal communication]

In 2012 the OGC, BuildingSMART International, ISO TC 211 and ISOTC 59/SC 13 began discussing ways of cooperating to support harmonization. A Civil Summit held in Waltham, Massachusetts (USA) and Abu Dhabi was organised cooperatively by bSi and OGC.  Since then several domain working groups (DWGs) have been formed to identify gaps and work toward cross-disciplinary standards.  For example, The OGC 3DIM Domain Working Group (DWG) works jointly with ISO TC 59 and buildingSMART to facilitate the definition and development of interface and encoding standards that enable software solutions that allow infrastructure owners, builders, emergency responders, community planners, and the traveling public to better manage and navigate complex built environments.

Geospatial domain working groups (DWGs)

At the ISO/TC 59 Plenary Week Leif Granholm of Trimble gave a quick but comprehensive overview of the work of the three geospatial domain working groups (DWG) in which all three standards groups are involved.  

3D Information Management (3DIM) DWG

3DIM, which used to be called CAD/GIS DWG, is involved in some areas of 3D interoperability that are creating the foundation for moving forward in the direction of modeling entire cities.  These include CityGML, which with extensions can model most of the above ground features of cities excluding inside buildings, augmented reality markup language (ARML), 3D  portrayal, and a first start at a successor to LandXML (which is an orphan right now) called InfraGML, and Indoor Geographic Markup Language (IndoorGML).

IndoorGML

One of the most important initiatives is IndoorGML.  Leif Granholm and others foresee that this may be the "the next big thing", as important for navigating indoor spaces as GPS was for outdoors.  Anyone with a mobile phone with a GPS or a GPS in their car is familiar with how easy it is to navigate anywhere on the planet - as long as it's not in a building.

There are two dimensions to this challenge.  The first is finding a technology analogous to GPS for assigning an XYZ location to people and things in buildings.  For example, in a hospital it is often urgent to be able to determine instantly where Dr Morgan is and where the nearest "crash cart" is.  In a mall it is important for a shopper to know where he or she is at any given instant, where whatever they are looking for is, and how to navigate between the two.  Determining where you are in a building is a technical challenge that is still getting a lot of attention from researchers.
 
The other dimension is context, typically represented by a 3D model of the interior spaces of buildings.  This can show context for shoppers to direct them to whatever they are looking for.  For a maintenance person, it is also necessary to be able to dissolve walls, ceilings, and floors to expose the building's infrastructure, electrical, fire, water, HVAC, and so on.  IndoorGML is intended the provide a standard for modeling indoor spaces.  But it is a more complicated problem.  Compared to outdoors there is a hundred times more data indoors.  Outdoors there are a relatively small number of data providers; national mapping agencies, national space agencies, commercial data providers like Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Nokia, TomTom and volunteered data like OpenStreetMap, and so on.  Indoors there are likely to be hundreds of thousands of data providers.  Just as every firm nowadays develops its own web site, many foresee that every firm will develop its own 3D presence and map of its space, for example, to enhance its attractiveness to customers navigating their way around the mall using a 3D map.  IndoorGML provides a standard that will enable this to happen.

The first version of IndoorGML was approved a week ago.

CityGML 3

Development of the next version of CityGML is just ramping up.  But unlike the standards development process used in the past which relied on sharing Microsoft Word documents and wikis, CityGML3 will be developed using a novel approach that was successfuly used for developing the GeoPackage standard.  One of the major innovations from an OGC perspective of the GeoPackage standard development process was achieved by putting the GeoPackage specification out on GitHub, which made it much more accessible to the developer community than if it had been made available in the traditional OGC way. 

The other innovation that CityGML3 will benefit from is a modular approach to standards development. CityGML 3 is actually comprised of 10 sub projects rather than one mega project.

Urban Planning DWG

This is a brand new DWG.  Its objective is to identify the gaps and to facilitate the development of standards to enable interoperability between smart city applications.  Technologies and trends such as Augmented Reality (AR), Smart Cities, Smart Grids, Sensor Webs, the Internet of Things (IoT), LBS (Location Based Services), Facilities Management, navigation (indoor and outdoor) and “Big Data” Analytics all can play important roles in informing urban planners.  In these technology domains, open standards can facilitate the development, publication, discovery, and use of information. The OGC Urban Planning DWG intends to discover requirements for open geospatial standards in information systems involved in the planning, design, use, maintenance and governance of publicly accessible spaces. The DWG already has plans for an OGC Smart City Testbed focused on urban resilience and in 2015 an OGC Smart City pilot.

Land and Infrastructure DWG

A major project for this DWG is to develop a standard called InfraGML for exchanging information relating to highways and roads.  By way of background, LandXML is a widely used standard supported by almost 800 members in the roads and highway transportation sector.  A number of years ago an unsuccessful attempt had been made to make LandXML compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Geography Markup Language (GML) standard for geospatial data.

The immediate issue is that LandXML, which is not associated with a recognized international standards organization, has been unsupported for over five years.  To address this issue the Land and Infrastructure DWG chartered a LandInfraSWG (Standards Working Group) for LandXML. Its first activity was to reverse-engineer a UML model and documentation (which were lacking) for LandXML 1.2 as a basis for assessing the viability of supporting LandXML as an OGC interoperability standard. A number of deficiencies relative to the OGC baseline were identified.  The LandInfraSWG has proposed developing a new standard, dubbed InfraGML, that will encompass a subset of LandXML functionality, be defined by a UML conceptual model, would incorporate GML and most importantly for the future, would be supported by the OGC.

CityGML and IFC common data model

Another very interesting project with important implication for the future of geospatial-BIM convergence is creating a conceptual model of road alignments that will be used in both OGC and buildingSMART standards for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges. This is particularly challenging, but extremely important because it is a first step in developing full lifecyle models for infrastructure from planning through design and construction to operate and maintain.  OGC focuses on planning and operation whereas design and construction are buildingSMART’s focus area.

Urban planning working group announced by the Open Geospatial Consortium

An Urban Planning Domain Working Group (DWG) has been chartered to define the role for Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards within the urban planning discipline.  The DWG offers an open forum for the discussion and presentation of interoperability requirements, use cases, and implementations of OGC standards relevant to urban planning. 

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. Requirements identified by OGC Domain Working Groups are typically used as the basis for standards development by chartered OGC Standards Working Groups (SWGs).

Image: Sunshine Ecomap

OGC's new Urban Planning group releases draft charter

An Urban Planning Domain Working Group (DWG) is being chartered to define the role for OGC standards and related activities related to urban planning.  It is also intended to provide an open forum for the discussion of interoperability requirements, use cases, pilots, and implementations of OGC standards in this domain.  The OGC seeks comments from the public on the draft new charter. The comment period closes on  6 August 2014.

Technologies and trends such as Augmented Reality (AR), Smart Cities, Smart Grids, Sensor Webs, the Internet of Things (IoT), LBS (Location Based Services), Facilities Management, navigation (indoor and outdoor) and “Big Data” Analytics all can play important roles in informing urban planners.  In these technology domains, open standards can facilitate the development, publication, discovery, and use of information. The OGC Urban Planning DWG intends to discover requirements for open geospatial standards in information systems involved in the planning, design, use, maintenance and governance of publicly accessible spaces.

Autonomous vehicles forecast to be commercially available by 2020

Google has had a fleet of 10 or more driverless cars on the roads in Florida, Nevada, and California for a couple of years that by now have logged over a million driverless miles.  The latest cars from mainstream vehicle manufacturers already include intelligent functions such as keeping in lane while adjusting speed to the vehicle in front, automated parking, and crash prevention. 

According to a recent report form Navigant Research there is an industry consensus that the first vehicles with comprehensive self-driving features will be brought to market by 2020.  The technology to support autonomous vehicles such as image processing and sensor fusion are now ready for production use, and supervised decision-making software is in trial on public roads.  Navigant Research forecasts that 94.7 million autonomous-capable vehicles will be sold annually around the world by 2035. 

The human toll from highway accidents is immense.  It has been estimated that a total of 3,551,332 motor vehicle deaths have occurred in the United States from 1899 to 2012.  Every year there are an estimated 1.2 million deaths worldwide in automobile collisions - over 30,000 in the U.S., over 240,000 in India, over 270,000 in China.  Autonomous vehicles have the potential to dramatically reduce the number of fatal accidents on the world's highways.

Asian smart city investment projected to quadruple by 2023

Urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon, but most of the world’s largest and fastest-growing urban areas are found in Asia.  Smart city technology is becoming an essential element in the development of Asian megacities. There are several smart city initiatives already underway in Asia.  For example, the new Indian government's just released 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.

A new report from Navigant Research analyzes the smart ciity market including smart energy, smart transportation, smart water, smart buildings, and smart government in Asia  (Australia/New Zealand, Greater China, India, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Korea).  Navigant forecasts that annual smart city technology investment in Asia Pacific will increase from $3.0 billion in 2014 to reach $11.3 billion in 2023.

Indian budget announces intention to develop 100 smart cities

Prime Minister Modi of India has released his government's first budget.  According to one perspective the budget looks generally positive for the geospatial community in India.

Smart cities

The announcement by the Finance Minister with major implications for the geospatial community  is a sum of Rs 7060 crores (US$1.2 billion) towards the development of one hundred smart cities.  By making an exclusive allocation of this amount of money in the budget for the smart city project, the government appears to be making this a high profile national initiative. 

Infrastructure

In addition the budget contains specific allocations for infrastructure projects with implications for the geospatial and AEC communities.

• Master planning for 3 new smart cities in the Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor region
• Development of industrial corridors with emphasis on smart cities linked to transport connectivity to spur growth in manufacturing and urbanization will be accelerated, for example the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC)
• Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial master planning
• An investment Rs 37,880 crores (US$6.3 billion) for the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and State Roads
• Target of 8500 km of national highways construction in the current financial year  
• Rs 100 crores (US$17 million) toward linking India's rivers
• Scheme for development of new airports in Tier I and Tier II cities

The railway budget also includes important opportunities for the geospatial community.  The Railway Minister specifically mentioned GIS in noting that "Indian Railways holds vast land assets, which need to be digitised and mapped using GIS for better management and usage."

In addition the first dedicated bullet train project was announced on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad route.  The government has also announced its intention to make India the largest freight carrier of the world.

According to one assessment, "the new Budget sounds a forward-looking and affirmative note in terms of giving due emphasis to the geospatial industry. Now it needs to be seen how the geospatial industry and solution providers can tap the various opportunities unleashed by the government and gain a strong foothold in nation-building, decision-making and governance."

Open standards-based foundation for integrating BIM, geospatial and smart meters for urban energy performance optimization

The European Union has set itself aggressive goals to reduce GHG emissions by 20%, increase renewables share of energy generation to 20%, and to reduce energy consumption by 20% by 2020.  The EU seems to be on track for the first two goals, but the third remains a challenge.  In 2020, the European consumption of energy is projected to be 25 trillion kWh.  By 2040 it is expected to rise to 28 trillion kWh.  In terms of primary energy consumption, buildings represent around 40%.  In 2009, residential buildings consumed 68% of the total final energy use in buildings.  Energy in households is mainly consumed by heating (70%), cooling, hot water, cooking and appliances. Gas is the most common fuel used in buildings.

 

I have blogged about the European SUNSHINE project before.  The SUNSHINE (Smart Urban Services for Higher Energy Efficiency) project is focused on energy efficiency for buildings in an urban environment.  It is a European Commission (EC) funded project that started about a year ago and is intended to continue for 36 months.

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Energy certification of buildings is a key policy instrument for reducing the energy consumption and improving the energy performance of new and existing buildings. It is expected to help increase demand for high performance buildings by improving the energy performance of the building stock in urban centers. SUNSHINE is intended as a step towards toward such a policy and a way to  contribute to improving the energy efficiency of buildings.  SUNSHINE is intended to be accessible to Web and mobile platforms. An interesting aspect of the project is is the development of an extended CityGML model for representing urban structures for energy performance modeling.

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Three use cases are being considered.

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1 Assessment of energy performance

The goal is to supports the automatic large-scale assessment of building energy performance based on publicly available data. The building energy performance models will be used for energy.density mapping ("ECOMaps") .  It is intended that an ADE extension to CityGML for 3D building energy modeling will be developed.

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2 Heating and cooling forecast and alerts

This focuses on existing buildings that have been selected for energy performance improvement.  It relies on localized weather forecasts and other information to forecast heating/cooling requirements to optimize energy performance..

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3 Optimization of power consumption by public lighting

The idea is to control illumination so that areas are only illuminated when people are present and the level of natural lighting requires it.

 

SUNSHINE is based on customizing and integrating other EC-funded smart city applications including

• Smart urban services based on open standards to support energy efficiency of buildings
• Open data hub for data distribution
• eEnvironmental services for advanced applications within INSPIRE
• 3D CityGML models for solar energy potential assessment and noise mapping & simulation

SUNSHINE will be piloted at nine sites across five countries that include 20 public buildings in Ferrara, 60 technical buildings in Trentino, and public illumination systems in several Italian cities.

 

At Geospatial World Forum 2014 in Geneva this year as part of the GeoEnergy track, Piergiorgio Cipriano, GI/SDI Project Manager at Sinergis, Italy discussed integrating energy usage data from smart meters with city models using the CityGML standard with the goal of improving the energy performance of buildings on an urban scale.

Location is essential for linking information from different providers and sources.  The “ecomap” represents the “energy need” at building level.  For this simple map, it is necessary to integrate at the very least the following data in order to predict building energy performance with sufficient precision:

• Building footprints
• Building height (or number of floors)
• Building use(s)
• Building age and corresponding building envelope stereotypes
• Stereotypes for heating/hot-water/ventilation systems

Building modeling for urban energy performance modeling

The fundamental concept is to exploit existing standards as much as possible to avoid reinventing the wheel.  Two relevant standards for the energy performance analysis of buildings are the INSPIRE data specification for the spatial data theme Buildings (INSPIRE-BU) and  Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) CityGML with an Application Domain Extension (ADE) for the Energy Performance of Buildings (EPB).

Convergence of BIM and CityGML

CityGML has strongly influenced the development of the INSPIRE BU model, both for 2D and for 3D profiles.  The concept of a base model defining semantic objects, attributes and relations which are required by most applications has been adopted by INSPIRE BU (as core profiles).  The concept of External Reference to link to more domain-specific information systems or to ensure consistency between 2D and 3D representations of buildings has also been reused in INSPIRE BU.  The design pattern of Building – BuildingPart aggregation is also included in the INSPIRE applications schemas. Many attributes (e.g. RoofType, YearOfConstruction) have been included in INSPIRE BU 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.  The whole content of LoD1 - LoD4 including  features attached to buildings such as boundaries, openings, rooms are the base of the extended 3D profile.

For large scale energy performance at the urban level,  detailed interior elements of each building are not required.  It is possible to work at a simple Level of Detail 3 (LOD3) and include elements like roofs, envelope walls, and windows.  This can also be used to make a comparison with other data sources such as aerial thermal images.

Energy usage data exchange

Green Button implements the common-sense idea that electricity customers should be able to securely download their own easy-to-understand energy usage captured by their smart meter.  Not only does it provide the retail customer with access to their usage data , it also provides the ability to authorize a third party service provider to access his or her energy usage data directly.  This architecture presents a consistent mechanism for authorized exchange of energy usage information.

To integrate electric power usage information from smart meters into SUNSHINE, the GreenButton specification defined by the NAESD (North American Energy Standards Board) was identified as the preferred implementation option for the meter data exchange protocol to be used in Sunshine.  IEC 61968-9 was judged to be much more complicated and less supported in terms of practical examples and software tools.

Open, standards-based foundation for urban energy performance analysis

Together INSPIRE BU, CityGML with the energy performance ADE, and the Green Button specification for energy usage data provide an open, standards-based foundation for energy performance analysis for urban environments.

Comprehensive open city model for Bahrain includes underground infrastructure

Locating underground infrastructure in Bahrain

Bahrain is one of the few places in the world which attempts to maintain the location of all underground infrastructure in a single database.  As I blogged in 2009, the location of all underground infrastructure in Bahrain is stored in a single Oracle Spatial RDBMS.  This database Intelligent Decision Support System (iDSS), which is supported by  the Ministry of Works, includes all utility networks

• electricity including transmission, distribution, and street lighting
• water including transmission and distribution
• wastewater including storm, road, sanitary, and combined
• telecommunications

The source databases are maintained by the respective owners, water and electricity by the Water and Electricity Authority, telecommunications by Batelco, and wastewater by the Ministry of Works.  iDSS has several layers of security that determine who can see what, and who can update what.

Anyone proposing to add to or make a change to underground infrastructure is required to complete a Proposal Request, essentially a building permit.  The request is forwarded electronically to all of the participating utilities, who are required to review and respond to the request within three days.

Developing a national 3D data model

At the GEO Business 2014 conference in London, Debbie Wilson, Senior Information Architect at the Ordnance Survey in the UK, presented an overview of the development of a comprehensive national 3D city model for Bahrain that she designed in less than six months under the sponsorship of the Survey and Land Registration Bureau of the Kingdom of Bahrain (SLRB). The goal is to develop a national 3D data model that supports a broad range of objectives including topographic mapping, land administration, hydrographic survey, utilities, infrastructure, local governance and spatial planning, agriculture, aquaculture, and environment.  Currently it does not include the inside of buildings or other structures. 

Specifically the national 3D data model is intended to support SLRB strategic initiatives

• 3D data capture
• As-built survey
• Underground utilities
• Sand search

It is intended to promote better government data sharing as a key underpinning for economic development.  This is a public-private partner (PPP) initiative involving municipalities, the Ministry of Works, and utilities.

Debbie's approach was to use existing standards (ISO, OGC, INSPIRE, industry-specific) as much as possible and to extend them only as required to meet the objectives of the SLRB. The basic model is CityGML with the CityGML utility extension ( Application Domain Extensions or ADE) for underground utilities.  In addition Debbie designed a specific ADE for Bahrain's national model called the Bahrain CityGML ADE which added floors and sub-units for high-rise buildings and some other elements for land administration. The 3D model she developed ultimately included 236 feature classes and supports Level of Detail (LoD) 3. 

Currently it does not support building information models (BIM), but the SLRB is interested in extending the model to support BIM in the future.

Implementation

A prototype implementation of the Bahrain National Data Model was developed on Oracle Spatial.  Data was imported from a variety of sources including the Ministry of Public Works, municipalities and utilities.  The data model and interface to the database are intended to be vendor neutral.  Demonstration applications using the data base were developed using ESRI ArcScene and CityEngine, Bentley Map and Google Maps.

Debbie credits open standards as a key factor in enabling this comprehensive national data model to be developed so rapidly, in under six months.  Furthermore the implementation only required two months.  The advantages that Debbie found from using open standards include

• Consistent framework enabling different domains to come together to develop a harmonized data model
• Provides a long-term foundation for data maintenance and exchange
• Platform independent allowing implementation using wide range of technologies
• Comprehensive 3D National Data Model developed in 6 months
• Prototyping team implemented model for all 236 features in Oracle database and migrated data within 2 months
• SLRB team developed series of demonstrations using key stakeholder applications withi 3 days
• SLRB and stakeholders can now start harnessing the power of their data to deliver new innovative services

Open national data model including utilities

This is an important step in developing a comprehensive data model and especially an open data model for underground utilities that I hope the smart cities community adopts and builds on.  I would recommend that any organization, municipal, regional, or national that is developing or intends to develop a national data model for modeling national infrastructure take a serious look at this open model and to consider using it as a reference for their own model.