Between the Poles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Initiative to create a national infrastructure map

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

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

State of U.S. infrastructure

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Fully automated classification of road and highway features for autonomous vehicles

Point clouds are fine for visualization to provide context, but to be really useful they need to be classified.  Feature extraction, as the process is often referred to,  is currently a mostly manual process that has been used for many years in the remote sensing sector. A trained person visually inspects the point cloud and graphically selects features which are identified by type of feature, sign, light pole, lane marking, and so on. 

Automated classification of point clouds

Image processing of 3D point clouds has advanced to the point where it has been possible to semi-automate this tedious feature extraction process.  The reliability of the automation process depends on the point density of point cloud, often expressed as points per square meter or per square centimeter.  Point density depends on the technology used to capture the point cloud. Terrestrial lidar, for example, typically captures points at the rate of hundreds of thousands to millions of point per second and is capable of millimeter to centimeter precision. Phodar generates lower point densities and is less precise. Aerial lidar captures many points per second but with less precision because it is covering much greater areas. Single photon lidar is a new technology that can collect 6 million points per second which means that planes can fly quite high, cover very broad areas and still collect 12 - 30 points per square meter.

At the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) conference in Singapore, Sharad Oberoi of Sanborn gave an insightful overview of the state of the art for automated feature extraction from combined aerial and mobile scans of highways and adjacent areas.  Different types of laser scanners are appropriate for capturing different types of features. Terrestrial and mobile laser scanners can capture point clouda that are suitable for extracting curbs, gutter drains, traffic signals, road and local terrain information, parking meters, walls, obstructions in the right of way, manholes, sidewalks, overhead clearances, lights, utility wires and connections, garbage cans, benches, fences, guardrails and barriers, retaining walls, and line of sight vegetation obstructions. Aerial lidar will only be able to get gutter drains, road and local terrain information, walls, obstructions in the right of way, and sidewalks with limited ability to get curbs, lights, utility wires and connections, retaining walls, and vegetation.  Lidar does not do well for metal structures such as communications towers and fir these a combination of lidar and phodar is preferred.

Sanborn has developed feature extraction technology that extracts transportation objects from combined aerial and mobile data sets in a semi-automated manner. The mobile and aerial data sets meet the accuracy and information content required for geospatial information for mapping applications as well as the additional information that can be mined for potential asset inventory and infrastructure information content. Mobile technology allows for the low-risk, rapid collection of geospatial information, limiting safety impacts to workers. The aerial LiDAR allows for the rapid collection of elevation information for detailed surface modeling as well as feature extraction. Both technologies collect enormous amounts of point-cloud data that can be merged using the Terrascan capability in Bentley MicroStation. The combined data set is then passed through the automated feature extraction modules to identify transportation objects.  Sanborn feature extraction modules achieve a high proportion of correct feature extraction for road and highway scans.

In the future Sharad expects that it will be possible to improve data collection efficiency by using terrestrial robots or autonomous UAVs equipped with SLAM technology to enable them to operate in GPS-denied areas such as under bridges and in tunnels.  Sanborn has been working with deep learning to improve the automated extraction process.  So far this has yielded mixed results, but Sharad expressed optimism that with AI full automation of the classification process will be achieved.

High precision maps for autonomous vehicles

An application of this technology is high precision maps for the autonomous vehicle market.

Sanborn develops high precision maps for the autonomous vehicle market.  Autonomous vehicles will require high precision maps which contain significantly more detailed information and true-ground-absolute accuracy than current road maps. Sanborn has developed proprietary mapping technology that leverages aerial imagery, aerial lidar data, and mobile lidar data to create standardized, high-precision 3D base-maps focusing specifically on the self-driving vehicle market. These maps include detailed inventories of all stationary physical assets related to roadways such as road lanes, road edges, shoulders, dividers, traffic signals, signage, paint markings, poles, and all other critical data needed for the safe navigation of roadways and intersections by autonomous vehicles.

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.

2017 ASCE Infrastructure Scorecard reveals slight improvement

The 2017 ASCE Infrastructure Scorecard has been released this morning.  Grades for seven categories of infrastructure – Hazardous Waste, Inland Waterways, Levees, Ports, Rail, Schools, and Wastewater – improved slightly. The grades for three categories – Parks, Solid Waste, and Transit – declined this year.  The overall cumulative GPA remained constant at D+.

2013 and 2017
Water and the environment

    Dams                    D  D
    Drinking Water      D  D
    Hazardous Waste D  D+
    Levees                  D- D
    Solid Waste          B- C+
    Wastewater          D  D+

Transportation

    Aviation                 D  D
    Bridges                 C+ C+
    Inland Waterways D- D
    Ports                     C  C+
    Rail                       C+ B
    Roads                   D  D
    Transit                   D  D-

Public Facilities

    Public Parks & Recreation C- D+
    Schools                 D  D+

Energy

    Energy                  D+ D+

Construction industry poised for rapid digitization

The CG/LA Infrastructure Leadership Forum in Montreal has provided a fascinating glimpse into what is happening around the world in infrastructure from a technology, financing, and business model perspective. . From 50,000 feet the big item is that the construction industry may be at the tipping point with respect to digitization.

PPP

Probably the highlight of the event is the success of PPP projects, especially in Canada.  About one quarter of major infrastructure projects in Canada are PPP.  In the U.S. the PPP model works well in some jurisdictions, for example, the Port Authority of New New York and New Jersey.  In some states PPP is illegal and even at the federal taxation level until recently there were tax regulations that hindered the adoption of the PPP model.  The presentations made clear that there are multiple PPP models.   Several projects in Latin America were looking at PPP alternatives that were better suited to their jurisdictions.  A conference attendee from Nigeria was clearly very interested in which of the PPP models were appropriate in his country.

Investment in infrastructure

Big numbers were on virtually every speaker's lips.  The Canadian Federal government intends to invest $180 billion over ten years in infrastructure, the Quebec government $87 billion, President Trump threw out $1 trillion over five years in a state of the union speech a few days ago, Boston Consulting Group has estimated that there is a spending gap of $1 trillion annually, and the ASCE estmates that US infrastructure requires an investment of $4 million just to make up for the lack of maintenance over the past decades. Some speakers made a convincing case that these estimates are overblown. Whatever the numbers there was a consensus that there is a very large need for investment in infrastructure. 

But infrastructure, while among the top ten priorities for Americans, is not up there with jobs and the economy.  The Boston Consulting Group estimates that there are 15.4 million jobs in the infrastructure industry.  On average these are better paying than the average blue collar job.  The BCG modeling suggests that $ 1 trillion invested in infrastructure could get this up to 19 to 20 million jobs.  To get attention infrastructure has to be about jobs.

The good news is that there was a consensus that there is a lot of money looking for infrastructure projects. One speaker estimated ten times as much money as projects to invest in.  The holdups appear to be:
1) Permitting - Few are willing to commit money to projects that don't have the requisite permitting in place.  In the U.S. that process requires on average 9.5 years, but can take up to 15 years.
2) Social licence - These days it is not enough to simply get the state, federal, presidential, US Army Corps of Engineers and other regulatory permits.  It is necessary to get a social licence which means actively seeking buyin from the community.  For example, the Plains and Eastern Tennessee transmission line project has been supported by the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations as well as local landowners and other stakeholders.  Sometimes opposition comes from unexpected sources.  Clean Line's several big transmission projects have sometimes been filed against by the local utilities companies whose service territory the line crosses.
3) Business case - Investors are looking for a low risk investment with a good return.  That means that benefits to various stakeholders have to be identified and stakeholders brought into the project to spread the risk and reduce it for any one participant.

A lot of this money is private from domestic and international sources.  Japan and Saudi Arabia were both mentioned as sources of money for infrastructure investment.  Canadian pension funds are active in investing in infrastructure internationally.  To attract private funding infrastructure projects will have to generate returns, and that will drive investment in technology to improve productivity.

U.S. infrastructure market

Another highlight of the conference was Dan Rule's presentation on the Trump Transition Team's recommendation for infrastructure development in the next four years, which I blogged about previously.

Interestingly what Trump decides to do with respect to infrastructure may not be all that important. In the U.S. the federal government is not by any measure the biggest player in the infrastructure market - it only represents about 10% of the market. The big player is local governments. Local government has enormous power to choose projects, raise money and borrow money. This local autonomy is baked into the Constitution. Local governments decide on infrastructure projects and then float (tax deductible) bond issues to finance them.  The muni bond market is $3.2 trillion and is the second largest debt market.  There is good news here as well. The majority of the bond issues at the local level to fund infrastructure projects are successful in raising the necessary money through rates.State governments are also big players in the infrastructure market.  One speaker recommended to vendors and consultants looking for opportunities in the U.S. to look for municipalities who had recently successfully floated bond issues or states that had increased the gas tax or counties that has implemented a sales tax. In some states the state government and local governments are collaborating to fix all bridges in need of rehabilitation rather than inefficient one-offs by individual municipalities and counties. 

Large infrastructure projects

There are some very innovative large infrastructure projects around the world that were profiled at the conference.  I was very impressed that the long-haul transmission business appears to be coming to life in the U.S.  This business is not being driven by the incumbent power utilities, but by new players like Clean Line.  Geospatial technology underpins transmission line siting, transportation, and increasingly horizontal construction as drones, scanners, 3D visualization and other digital technology transforms the construction industry.

Technology

From a technology perspective just about every speaker referred to the lack of progress on productivity in the construction industry. Engineering and construction are second from the bottom on the IT adoption chart. But Wipro, Booz Allen Hamilton, Aconex,  Jacobs, and other vendors and analyst McKinsey believe that the construction industry is poised for the digitization revolution.  Vendors are investing heavily in technology including artificial intelligence, digital modeling such as BIM and full lifecycle BIM or BIM++ as one speaker referred to it, machine learning, drones, neural networks, virtual reality, big data, analytics, automation and hyperautomation.

GIS has been widely used by utilities for years for automated mapping/facilities management, back office records management, asset management, transmission line siting, and more recently for design and construction, energy conservation, vegetation management, mobile workforce management (MWFM), and outage management (OMS). Now, utilities are integrating GIS with automated meter infrastructure (AMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Intelligent design has crossed over from the office to the field in utilities, also enabled by the capabilities of GIS. Geospatial-related analytics (spatial analytics) is seen as one of the key aspects of success for electric utility operations in the smart grid era. Looking for patterns and correlations between different land, weather, terrain, assets, and other types of geodata will be increasingly important for utilities. Power-related analytics with geospatial components include network fault tracing, load flow analysis, Volt/VAR analysis, real-time disaster situational awareness, condition-based maintenance, and vegetation management.

As an example, PrecisionHawk is not only selling drone services but the geoanalytics to extract useful, actionable information. One of their targets is the construction industry and they intend to fit their solutions into existing workflows.  For example, a drone can collect aerial imagery of a stockpile, and the software provided by PrecisionHawk enables the volume of the stockpile to be calculated from the imagery without the user having to know much about drones, imagery, meshes or algorithms for calculating stockpile volumes.  PrecisionHawk also have an FAA permit for beyond-line-of-sight (BVLOS) drone flights. (I already blogged about the pilot flights that Xcel Energy also has an FAA permit for.) This suggests the next step will be drone data collection and geospatial analytical applications based on this data for linear construction projects.

3D model-based design is transforming construction in the Netherlands

At the GeoBIM Building and Infrastructure Conference in Amsterdam, Ingeborg Ligtenberg, Senior Project manager for Mega Projects, described how the Dutch highway authority Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) is piloting a very different approach to highway construction.  Rijkswaterstaat is responsible for the design, construction, management and maintenance of the main infrastructure facilities in the Netherlands including the national road network, waterway network and sluices. 

Background

By way of background, the highway plan-design-build process that has been used over at least the past 25 years, starts off with a complete (re)survey of the project terrain to create a basemap on which the design is based. Existing as-builts in the area are rarely if ever consulted.  The deliverables from the design process are paper drawings which are used by construction contractors to build the project.  After construction is complete construction as-builts are submitted to the owner, but these are not "sealed", meaning nobody signs off on them putting their professional reputation behind their accuracy and reliability.  Practically what this means is that in the transportation industry, as-builts are treated as unreliable information and are rarely consulted.

At SPAR 3D 2013 Ron Singh, Engineering Automation Manager/Chief of Surveys, Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) made a startling proposal that would stand the traditional highway construction process on its head. He proposed that the DoT should specify the data it needs and this data including BIM models and LIDAR scans would be collected by the DoT from the contractors during and after a highway construction project.  The data would be saved in a geospatially-enabled database maintained by the DoT.  One of the implications of this approach is that when a new project is initiated in the same area over 80 % of the necessary survey-grade information would already be available in the DoT's database, which would make the traditional complete resurvey unnecessary - saving time and money. 

As an example of how data reuse can save time and money, the Oregon DoT's first automated machine guidance (AMG) project was in 1997.   At that time in Oregon a few forward-looking contractors had invested in AMG technology foreseeing that it would save them money.  These forward-looking contractors were winning bids by lowering their estimates just enough to beat other contractors. They found that AMG technology did save a lot of money.  But the savings were going to the contractors, not to the DoT.  To redress this, starting in early 2015, the DoT began specifying on its bid web site that projects were "AMG ready" meaning that the DoT was making available provide all the data it had which could be download to see design BIM models, mobile LiDAR, overflight data, and so on.  The effect has been to drive bids down, because there is less risk for the contractor.  As a result the DoT is now sharing in the savings.

Rijkswaterstaat pilots

At the first GeoBIM conference in Amsterdam, Jothijs van Gaalen gave some real world examples of highway construction transformation based on GIS+BIM integration including using laser scanning/LiDAR for reality capture at the beginning of a design/construction project. 

The Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) board is convinced of the benefits of BIM and BIM/geospatial integration and decided initially to roll out BIM on four design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects with the intention to require BIM on all DBFM-contracts in the future.

One of these projects is a highway expansion project for the highway connecting Schiphol-Amsterdam-Almere or SAA.  The objective of the SAA project was to improve the accessibility and quality of life within the SAA corridor. This includes the improvement of the natural and social environment and economic development and employment opportunities in the northern Randstad region.  A stretch of the highway is shown before and after the highway widening.

On many highway projects RWS had experienced information flow problems due to different formats and data models.  This not only necessitated major data conversion efforts, but also inhibited collaboration.  One of the goals of the SAA project was to improve information flow which was expected to also improve the flow of asset information for reuse during the maintenance phase of the highway.

A critical part of the RWS' new approach was the Information Delivery Specification (ILS). The ILS specified the general aspects of the required information including formats, standards, structure, and expected quality (timeliness and reliability) of the information.  The ILS was a contractual obligation that also required the contractor to accept new versions of standards on a yearly basis.  The standards that were adopted to ensure a uniform flow of structured information include VISI (an open communication standard for the construction industry based on XML), National Concept Type Library (CB-NL), Object Type Library (OTL), and COINS.

Today RWS is receiving a quarterly delivery of data from the contractor compliant with the ILS.  This is a remarkable achievement that required a lot of hard work during this first project.  But now that contractors are familiar with the standards and the ILS concept, it is expected that ensuring a uniform flow of information will be easier in future projects.  The next challenge is enabling this data to be used for asset management during the maintenance phase of the project.

Reusing data on future projects

 In response to a question, Ingeborg Ligtenberg said that this new approach was still in its initial phases but that the data would likely be made available to designers and contractors for future projects.  It would be made available on an "as is" basis, which sounds similar to how the Oregon DoT makes its data available on its bid site. 

As Ron Singh has pointed out, there is tremendous value in this data, but the value is only there if in the future engineers feel confident in using the data.  If very accurate and rich data were collected during and after construction including, critically, its lineage in the form of metadata about how and when it was captured, so that a future engineering user would have no reason not to trust its provenance and reliability, then there should be nothing to prevent the data from being reused in future projects - saving time and money.

Autonomous vehicles

One of the consumers of this digital highway information may be autonomous vehicles.  In-vehicle sensing is limited in its ability to enable safe and reliable driving under all conditions.  For example, on snowy roads, lane markings may not be visible. Such driving conditions will require the autonomous vehicle to be equipped with ultra-accurate maps to augment in-vehicle sensing systems.  Pre-loaded high-precision maps would enable autonomous vehicles to overcome many of these challenges – staying within lanes when wintry conditions obscure the lane markers. This will require sophisticated mapping systems and ultra-accurate and reliable DoT data to enable vehicles to navigate under challenging conditions.

Progress of BIM for infrastructure in Europe

The European construction market amounts to € 1.2 trillion annually or 9.9% of total EU GDP.  There are 3.1 million organizations in the European construction industry of which more than 95% are SMEs.  As in many jurisdictions over a third of construction projects are overbudget or overschedule.

In January 15, 2014 the European Parliament passed the European Union Public Procurement Directive (EUPPD) which among other things recommended the use of building information modelling (BIM) for public works contracts to enable more efficient construction and building projects in Europe.  Passage of the bill allowed member states to encourage, specify or mandate the use of BIM for publicly funded construction and building projects in the EU by 2016.

Prior to that some EU governments had already mandated or had concrete plans to mandate BIM for publicly funded projects.  Finland, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway led BIM adoption in Europe.  At the recent GeoBIM Building and Infrastructure conference in Amsterdam, Kjetil Tonning, Vice President of the European Construction Industry Federation (FIEC), gave an overview of the status of BIM for infrastructure in the EU with the objective of determining whether BIM for infrastructure (horizontal BIM) is lagging behind BIM for buildings (vertical BIM) in Europe.  His assessment of various countries' progress with respect to BIM for infrastructure reveals that some countries are making rapid progress while others are lagging.

Germany

Last year Alexander Dobrindt, Bundesminister für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur (BMVI), announced a step-by-step plan for the introduction of BIM.  It requires three steps: a preparatory phase up to 2017, a pilot phase by 2020, and mandatory BIM is to be used from 2020 on all newly planned projects of the BMVI.  Dobrindt's goal is to make digital planning and building nationwide a standard. To achieve this the public sector has to act as a major builder in order to drive cultural change. The German government has set up a committee for reforming large construction project.  It has formulated the principle: "Erst digital, dann real bauen" (Build digitally first, then real).  Four pilot projects have been launched to obtain real world experience with BIM.  BMVI has developed a timetable for the planning and building of the future, which will make BIM a new standard for transport infrastructure projects by 2020.

Sweden

In Sweden a project BSAB to develop a classification system for buildings and civil engineering works has culminated in the development of a classification standard CoClass, which is based on international standards for classification and ISO standards for data transfer (ISO 12006-2).  BSAB is owned by the Swedish Building Centre, a company that is owned by 32 Swedish construction and FM organizations.

CoClass is the result of an extensive industry-wide development effort called BSAB 2.0 which ran for over a year and a half.  Unlike other classification systems the classification is BIM-based and is intended to cover the entire built environment through the full life cycle including operations and maintenance. The project has been supported by the the Swedish Building Centre, BIM Alliance Sweden, Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket), Cooperation Forum for state property developers and managers, PEAB, BEAst, Swedavia, Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKL) and the Stockholm County Council (SCC) traffic management.  Trafikverket and others are now implementing CoClass.

Spain

The Spanish government's BIM roadmap foresees mandatory BIM for public infrastructure projects occurring after mandatory BIM for buildings.   But the Government's strategy has been delayed and at this time the timetable remains unclear.

BIM for Infrastructure in Europe

Kjetil Tonning concluded that BIM for infrastructure is lagging behind BIM for buildings in Europe.  EU policy could help correct this.  He mentioned climate change, circular economy, strategy on the urban environment, prevention of natural and man-made disasters, and the digital agenda as areas where EU policy initiatives would help accelerate the adoption of BIM for infrastructure by EU member states.

HxGN LIVE Precision mapping underground utilities with combined LiDAR and GPR

One of the most exciting presentations at the annual Hexagon conference HxGN Live in Anaheim from the viewpoint of practical application of new technology was a talk given by Gilbert Roulier of Grunder Ingenieure AG, who reported on a pilot project in Berne, Switzerland, to map underground utilities using combined mobile laser-scanning (mobile LiDAR) and ground penetrating radar (GPR). The objective of the pilot was to asses the capability of the equipment to capture in 3D culverts and water pipelines under streets in Berne with an accuracy of +/- 10 cm.

Equipment

The equipment used was a Leica Pegasus: Stream comprised of a Leica Pegasus:Two integrated with a Stream EM and towed by a vehicle.  One of the advantages of the Stream EM is that it is comprised of three antenna arrays - two for main line detection and one array for crossing line detection.  The Stream EM captures real-time tomography of the subsurface to about 4 meters in depth.  The combined LiDAR and GPR array can be towed at a speed of about 15 km/h.  In addition to capturing subsurface structures, the combined device also captured above ground structures.  Manholes and other visible surface infrastructure were used as ground control points.

After data capture there is a combined workflow that post processes the data captured by the Pegasus:Stream.  The final result is 3D data that can be imported into ArcGIS and AutoCAD.  As part of the pilot the data was compared to existing records and maps prepared showing the divergence.

Results and Benefits

The pilot revealed significant benefits from using combined LiDAR and GPR array.  First of all that the laser scanning and GPR equipment worked simultaneouly reduced traffic disruption.  It also dramatically improved productivity - up to 100 km could be captured and processed per day - including both above ground information about road structure and condition and below location of underground utilities in 3D.  An important advantage of the Stream EM array from a productivity perspective is that data collection was only required in one direction since the Stream EM array includes an array for transverse scanning of infrastructure crossing the direction of the scan.  An important advantage of the combined system is that it is capable of +/- 10 cm in locating underground infrastructure in 3D. Finally, the combined Pegasus: Stream array was much safer for the operator.  

From Grunder's perspective the pilot was successful and they report that they are seriously considering investing in the Pegasus:Stream.  Grunder sees the potential users of the combined system surveying companies and utility companies - both public and private.  It believes that the equipment could be used routinely for mapping of underground assets including pipe and cable detection and mapping, but also for road maintenance and renewal, subsurface cavity detection and in a modified form for ballast monitoring on rail lines.

Future

In his keynote at HxGN LIve Hexagon Geosystems President Juergen Dold made it clear that mapping digital realities above and below streets is a key technology for Hexagon Geosystems.  Very recently Hexagon announced the establishment of a georadar portfolio with three releases to provide applications in utility mapping, asset detection and mapping, and monitoring.  Included in the georadar portfolio is the Leica Pegasus:Stream which Hexagon sees as enabling mass digitization of infrastructure assets, such as telephone cabinets above and cable conduits below, by collecting data in less time without needing to stop traffic, increasing the safety of the road work crew.  They emphasize that the Pegasus:Stream has the potential to collect up to 100 km per day at 15 km/hr, providing digital documentation for GIS and CAD modelling.

I had an opportunity for a brief chat with Stuart Woods, Leica Geosystems Vice-President of Mobile Mapping, about Hexagon's plans for the Leica Pegasus: Stream.  According to Stuart Hexagon is planning to invest in the technology such as enhancements to the antenna arrays to increase the precision of the radar record.  They also intend to investigate translating the radar record into something more understandable like a point cloud.

Conclusion

The very exciting conclusion I draw from this is that the technology for underground remote sensing has finally gotten good enough that a major company sees an important market opportunity and is seriously investing in the technology and business of developing and manufacturing devices for detecting and mapping underground utilities. 

SPAR2016: Digitalizing highway construction at the Oregon DoT

At SPAR 2013Ron Singh, Engineering Automation Manager/Chief of Surveys, Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) made a startling proposal that would stand the traditional highway construction process on its head by making the post-construction as-built survey the critical source of reliable survey and asset information in the form of a geo-referenced 3D BIM model (also known as horizontal BIM, heavy BIM, VDC, civil information modeling, BIM on its side, and BIM for infrastructure) and associated scanned and other data.  One of the implications of this is that when a new project is initiated in the same area over 80 % of the necessary survey-grade information is already available in the DoT's geospatially-enabled database making the traditional complete resurvey unnecessary - saving time and money.   Ron foresees that one of the consumers of this digital highway information would be autonomous vehicles.

This year at the Spar 3D 2016 Expo and Conference in Houston I had a chance to sit down with Ron to see how his and other DoTs have progressed on his vision since then.

Ron, the last time we chatted you mentioned you were organizing an event for Western State DoTs in July 2014. How did that go?

It was very successful. I did this on behalf of the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) who approached me and said they planned to do an event similar to the one I organized in 2010 which was called Design to Dozer. In that one we used digital technology including automated GPS-equipped dozers, graders, and excavators to build a sub grade of a road.  It was well attended and it really made a change for my DoT.

The FHA asked me to do another one to promote the use of intelligent construction technologies by providing information and training relating to 3D design, automated machine guidance (AMG) and related technologies for highway construction.  This time I decided to go all the way to paving including ditches, culverts, and drainage. I called it Design to Paver.  We invited the DoTs from the18 Western States plus Florida, North Carolina, and Michigan.  From each Dot we invited their chief engineer and their chief construction engineer.  Altogether we had about 250 people at the event.  It was a two day event and combined classroom work in the morning with on-site in afternoon.

This event included building a demonstration road but I wanted to build one we wouldn't have to tear up and restore. I found a piece of land that was a training facility for the Oregon National Guard. It was a big complex of about 40 or 50 acres and had been a training site since WWII. I went out to see the site and met with them and their environmental people.  I sketched out a plan for a road about 1500 feet long. I picked a site where the road would gain 200 feet in elevation because I wanted it to be fairly complex. I wanted to make some radical curves with superelevations and exaggerated superelevations, so we would have some drainage issues to deal with.  I wanted it to look like a real road and have some interesting geometry. No underground utilities. I wanted to take it from bare earth to a finished 1500 foot road with several curves, ditches, culverts, and paved in less than 2 days.  I don't know exactly but with a traditional approach this would probably have required about a week's work.  We could actually have done it in less than two days, but we were demonstrating.

We did all the surveying for the site months in advance.  We also had a geo-referenced 3D design model with rendering and animation.  We brought in the construction equipment the day before.  We had training sessions for the operators on safety including unexploded ordnance since this was a military training site.

I chunked the 1500 feet of road out in pieces and choreographed the whole thing.  For example, the dozer operator on each section of the road did not break ground until the audience showed up.  They stepped out of the buses and on their badges they had colour codes which allocated them to a team of about 25 people. Each group would go to station A at staggered times.  At station A they would be showed automated dozer operation. Then at a certain time they would go to station B and so on. It was very well coordinated.

What impact do you think the event had on the highway engineers who attended ?

It was amazing - the feedback through the emails I received was so positive.  People still talk about it. If you go to any of the DoTs who attended, the staff who had been there were just amazed.  One of the reasons is that what we were able to show them was something that would have taken a single individual many, many years to see, because none of them had experienced a project with automated equipment from breaking ground to paving.  They were able to experience it all in 2 days. We had all types of equipment, dozers, excavators, curb machines, paving machines, and so on.  We even had unmanned aircraft system (UAVs) for monitoring the construction and ground penetrating radar systems for detecting underground utilities.

Is there a way to find out more about this event?

We created a web site DesignToPaver.org which we intend to leave up for two more years. There is a guide book which you can download. It has more than the agenda. It has all the names of all the companies and  presenters.  If you would like to ask somebody questions, you can find that information in there.

Do you think the road map and time frame for 3D models and construction automation that you outlined is still realistic or is it accelerating?

The technology behind autonomous vehicles is really accelerating as is the engineering automation of highway construction, but the social and legal aspects of highway construction may be the barriers that are keeping it in check. If it were only up to to the technology we would be there much quicker, but I think the social and legal aspects are actually providing good balance, by making sure we are not breaking something that we can't replace.

You mentioned the legal aspects, do you think new legislation will be required to enable to the full digitialization of highway construction and maintenance ?

As long as you put a box around the question and restrict it to engineering automation, not autonomous cars, I think we are well-suited to get there with the existing laws.  I could imagine that to further capitalize on this technology, legislation to register another profession, such as remote sensing, might be beneficial.  I don't necessarily feel that it has to be a surveyor's function to do, let's say, mobile mapping or UAV mapping. I feel it needs to be somebody who is licensed, who has gone through training, who is able to prove that they know how to do this work, and who maintains ongoing professional development training.  The key requirement is that they stand behind their products in a legal sense.

There are many different technologies for capturing data now, even a consumer digital camera can be used to create a point cloud. If I  am a highway engineer how do I decide what data I can rely on for designing a highway ?

The data that has the level of rigour required for engineering design is what I call authoritative data. As an example, if you intend to use a boat with a sonar system and cameras for underwater bathymetric surveying in search of treasure, that's fine. I don't think anyone should regulate that. But if you are going to use the same tools to model bathymetry for the design of a public bridge, then it better be authoritative.  It better be data that you can track the lineage and source of.

One of the key questions I have is about the database of digital data including, in the case of Oregon, data from overflights and mobile LiDAR for the entire state highway system plus the digital as-built models and other data from actual construction projects.  Who do you see is responsible for maintaining this database including updates from ongoing highway maintenance work ?

In Oregon we think we at the DoT are responsible for maintaining it. As long as it is inside our corridor, it was either created by us or by our agents, companies that we hired. There is tremendous value in this data, but the value is only there if in the future people feel confident in using the data.  For that they need to know its provenance.  For example, if you consider our as-built plans, we have had these for generations, but we don't rely on them for anything but to help us find things. We don't rely on them for survey data, because the current as-builts were never created with that in mind.

If we collected very accurate, very rich data and we didn't track its lineage including metadata about how it was captured and when, a future engineering user would legitimately say I don't trust it, because I have no narrative about this data, for example, even something as fundamental as what coordinate system it is in.  But if we can compile all this information together in the form of comprehensive metadata that gives the future user trust in its provenance and reliability, then there should be nothing to prevent the data from being reused.

Are contractors who bit to build roads in Oregon interested in the data you are collecting - do they ask you for it ?

For construction project work, when we use mobile LiDAR or terrestrial laser scanning, we are very careful about precision, for example, we put in ground control points. We do the entire survey in such a way that we end up with a certain level of accuracy, a certain level of point density, and a certain level of reliability. 

When we collect mobile LiDAR data for the whole state, it is impossible to do collect data with the same rigour for the whole state.  We don't put ground control points in and we don't do other things that are required for high precision and reliability.  The data is still very usable for many things, but it is not authoritative, high accuracy survey data, that is required for engineering design.

If you are planning a project in an area where there was a previous project with a digital model, high precision data including ground control points and high density laser scans, would you tell contractors planning to bid on the project about the existing data ?

Absolutely. If we don' t tell them then we might as well as had not collected, documented (metadata) and stored it. We have to tell them because it helps drive the cost down.  To give you some background, our first automated machine guidance (AMG) project was in 1997.  In Oregon some contractors had invested in AMG technology and wanted to use it. In those days contractors who had done this were winning the bids by lowering their bid just enough to beat the other contractors.  When they did the work with AMG technology, they saved a lot of money, but most of the savings was going to the contractors, not to the DoT.  To redress this, starting in early 2015, we began specifying on our bid web site that projects were "AMG ready". We provide all the data we have which they can download to see the models, mobile LiDAR, overflight data, and so on.  The effect is to drive bids down, because there is less risk for the contractor.  Asa result we at the DoT are now sharing in the savings.

Is Oregon alone among DoTs in applying these technologies or are other DoTs also applying them ?

There are about five or six that are leaders in using different aspects of digital technology.  For example, the Wisconsin DoT is focusing on 3D design - they are ahead of us in this technology. Michigan is leading in some areas,  for example, data storage and data management. We met with them because we were interested to finding out what they were doing with engineering data management.  In return they were interested in what we were doing with 3D design and AMG. Utah his way ahead of most DoTs in asset management.  None of the DoTs including us are applying every aspect of 3D digital highway construction and maintenance.

Are there any ROI studies demonstrating the financial benefits of these digital technologies ?

We are doing one. We have a research project we call the OSU Engineering Automation project with Oregon State University in Corvalis.  They are studying our entire engineering automation process. They have already put a good project team together.   The final report is due by next April, about a year from now.