Between the Poles

Perceptality: new laser scanning applications potentially transforming construction

At HxGNLive Juergen Dold, President of Hexagon Geosystems which is responsible for the Leica Geosystems brand, gave a talk about perception and reality.  Perception is how we see the world, but perceptions are subjective and are not always reliable.  Reality can be quite different.  If you have ever worn a pedometer,  you will know exactly what he is referring to - the actual number of steps you walked or ran is often quite different from what you think you did.  Until now measuring things in construction and other industries has been so laborious that it is frequently not done.  Decisions may end up based on the "biggest salary's" opinion.  With laser scanning, photogrammetry, UAVs and other technologies measuring things has become several orders of magnitude easier and we can replace some of our perceptions with reality - Juergen called it fusing reality and perception - and coined a new term for it perceptality.  Since as Peter Drucker said, you can't manage what you don't measure, increasing the reality domain at the expense of someone's perception has the potential to dramatically change construction.

Juergen provided several interesting real world examples of how this translates into practice.

1 Vegetation management for transmission lines - inspecting transmission lines for vegetation encroachment in North America is mandated by NERC.  This is typically an expensive, slow process involving a helicopter carrying a LiDAR camera.  To capture the necessary density of points to be able to identify cables, pylons, and different types of vegetation requires flying at low altitude.  With the latest single photon laser scanner (Leica SPL100), it is possible to collect 80 points per square meter (m²) flying at an altitude of 2,500 meters (about 8,000 ft) as opposed to 3 points per m² with traditional linear laser scanning.

2 Urban mapping - urban mapping can also be time consuming and expensive, but with multiple cameras including LiDAR, photography, and near infrared it is possible to capture a more realistic 3D representation faster.

3 Scanning industrial plants - Cepsa (Compañía Española de Petróleos, S.A.U.) is a Spanish energy company who are scanning their chemical plants which requires thousands of scans.  A major software advance (Leica Cyclone) allows them to automate the registration process saving a lot of time.

4 Forensics - scanners in backpacks (Pegasus Backpack) or handheld scanners make it possible to walk through the scene of an accident or crime and capture trusted data without disturbing the site.  The data can be used in scientific forensic analysis and to visualize the results of the analysis in court.

5 Digitalizing AEC - The construction industry is one of the most inefficient industries.  $10 trillion is spent on construction goods and services every year. But whereas the average worker adds $37 of value for every hour worked, a construction worker adds only $25 per hour worked. Construction productivity has stagnated over the past decades in many of the world's advanced economies.  To attract the private financing that is necessary to build and maintain the world's infrastructure will require improving productivity.  Digitization can play an important role in this process or even be disruptive (transformative) as it has been in other industries. Innovative firms have increased productivity by 50 to 60 percent by infusing digital technology, new materials, and advanced automation, reskilling the workforce, changing business practices and pushing government to change regulations.

Our existing stock of structures will be with us for many years to come.  Maintaining this infrastructure is currently inefficient and expensive.  New technology can dramatically change this by making renovation more efficient and affordable.  A first step is democratizing scanning.  I have blogged about the deluge of handheld, low cost scanners that are now available.  Many see handheld scanners as potentially revolutionizing the construction sector.  Mantis Vision has offered a handheld scanner F5 for professionals for several years.  Originally targetted on the real estate industry, the Matterport Pro allows you to scan a house in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later you will have a fully-rendered model that can be used for walkthroughs with potential buyers.  The Faro Freestyle is targetted on the architecture, accident reconstruction, civil engineering, construction, facility management, and industrial manufacturing sectors. 

I have blogged previously about the Leica Geosystems BLK360 and Cyclone Register 360  which together appear to be a game changer for professionals in construction.  It is a bit of a stretch to call it a handheld scanner, but it weighs only 2.2 lbs (1 kg) and is incredibly small 6.5 by 4 inches.  Unlike other "handheld" devices it is a full laser scanner and imager - it captures 360,000 points/second with a range of 0.6 - 60 meters with millimeter precision. It has three cameras, laser scanner, photo, and near infrared.  It's one button operation redefines simplicity.  It can capture a full 360 degree scan in less than 3 minutes.  Cyclone Register 360 allows automated registration of scans from many devices to be merged with "one-button" simplicity.

DistribuTECH2016: Dramatically cutting utility costs with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying beyond visual line of sight

If you would ask me among all the new technologies on display here and at other events which will likely dramatically reduce the bottom line of utilities in the transmission business I would say unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones.  For example, every utility which has transmission lines spends large sums on overflying, typically with very expensive helicopter flights, transmission lines for vegetation management to monitor the trees to prevent them from interfering with transmissions lines.  If instead this could be done with much less expensive UAV flights, the savings would be huge. But right now this is not possible, because commercial operation of UAVs is only allowed by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) with visual line of sight (VLOS) rules.

 

The potential ROI of using UAVs for vegetation monitoring are expected to be sizable, but this requires the FAA to change regulations to permit operating of UAVs with beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) rules.  Today at DistribuTECH2016 Eileen Lockhart of Xcel Energy with partners Environmental Consultants Inc and Flot Systems gave a presentation that showed just how close we are to UAVs operating under BVLOS rules becoming a commercial reality for electric power utilities.

 

Xcel Energy, which has electric and gas assets in eight states, is the fourth largest utility in the U.S.  They have partnered with EEI, EPRI, INL and others in the utility sector to show the way in the application of UAVs in the utility sector.   This includes working with the FAA to push forward the practical application of UAVs in the utility sector.  Their objectives are improved safety for utility employees and the public, reducing risk to and improving reliability of the grid, and reducing the cost of operating and maintaining grid infrastructure.  The technologies involved include GIS and geospatial analytics in addition to the UAVs themselves.  Expected sources of major savings are reducing the need for expensive helicopters and plane flights and the time utility employees have to spend in the field.

 

Xcel launched their UAV Proof of Concept project in 2015 with seven UAV missions in transmission, gas operations, energy supply, and electricty distribution.

• Transmission line and tower inspections
• Substation facility rating data collection
• Pipeline bridge and river crossings inspections
• High pressure pipeline inspections
• Coal/ash storage inventory (volumetric)
• Wind turbine blade inspections
• Storm damage assessment

Just last week (Feb 3, 2016) Xcel with its partners completed the first beyond visual line of sight mission with UAV flights over 20 miles of transmission lines.  They are convinced that BVLOS flights will become a commercial reality in the near future.   The UAV flights will not  be flown by Xcel itself but by contractors such as Flot Systems operating with FAA licences.  Xcel has not yet calculated ROIs for the applications using UAVs, but plan to do so soon.

Geopatial data and technology projected to be a foundation for interoperable smart grid operations

At the Second Annual Summit on Data Analytics for Utilities in Toronto, Brad Williams, Vice President of Utilities Industry Strategy at Oracle, made the case that in the context of smart grid spatial analyics is going to be a key technology because everything a utility does (customers, assets, and operations) involves location.

Brad outlined a number of areas where spatial analytics are going to be applied including reducing non-technical losses, targeting demand response, distribution operations planning, transformer load management, data quality, voltage correlation (linking meters to transformers), energy modeling, voltage deviation monitoring, geographicl outage frequency analysis, and predictive analytics for electric vehicle adoption to name just a few.

Brad's analysis is supported by a 2012 report from Navigant (Pike Research) that forecasts that the increasing penetration of GIS into smart grid workflow applications, such as MWFM, DMS, energy management systems (EMS), OMS, customer information systems (CIS), and analytics will be the primary driver for electric utility GIS software and services growth with an annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.8%, increasing from $1.8 billion in 2011 to $3.7 billion in 2017. Navigant expects that in there will also be growth, but at a slower rate, in GIS in utility construction and engineering-related GIS applications driven and this will be led by the power grid build-out in Asia Pacific.

Smart grid will make GIS a foundation technology

GIS is currently applied tactically by utilities in several areas.  GIS has widely used by utilities for years for automated mapping/facilities management, back office, and plant and infrastructure architecture, engineering, construction (AEC).   Increaslngly it is also being used for asset management, mobile workforce management (MWFM), and outage management.  But smart grid is going to make GIS strategic.  GIS is already being applied to AMI, DMS and integrated with SCADA by early adopters.    Navigant project that with the development of the smart grid, GIS will become a foundation technology for interoperable grid operations. 

"The smart grid is all about situation awareness and effective anticipation of and response to events that might disrupt the performance of the power grid. Since spatial data underlies everything an electric utility does, GIS is the only foundational view that can potentially link every operational activity of an electric utility including design and construction, asset management, workforce management, and outage management as well as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distribution management systems (DMSs), renewables, and strategy planning.

Navigant sees the the challenges to effective adoption and use of GIS in the electric utility involve data complexity and quality, mobile workforce requirements, loss of GIS knowledge and skills through retirement, organizational structure, and the GIS vendor ecosystem.

An analysis by Research and Markets entitled Global GIS market in the Utility industry 2012 - 2016 projects that the utility GIS market will grow at a CAGR of 10.37 percent over the period 2012–2016. Research and Markets sees one of the key factors driving this market growth is the growing need for knowledge infrastructure. But it specifically targets the lack of awareness about utility GIS in developing countries as a potential inhibitor to market growth

Other challenges relevant to the utility GIS market include data quality, managing the mobile workforce, and changing the organizational structure of utilities. .

Data quality
Navigant identifies a history of poor GIS data quality as a major problem in the utility industry and reports that poor GIS data quality is an area of significant concern for smart grid planners who plan to use GIS as a foundational data layer for interoperable grid operational processes.  I have blogged about the challenge of data quality in the utility industry on a number of occasions. 

At a recent conference a speaker from a Canadian power utility emphasized that a key prerequisite for a successful data-driven analytical approach for utilities is quality data.   His utility found that when they started to make investment decisions based on their analysis of their operational data, the deficiencies in their data sets immediately become apparent.  For example, they found that only 76 % of their connectivity data was reliable, the remaining quarter was unusable.  To ensure the necessary level of data quality and reliability data governance (processes that ensure that important data assets are formally managed)  was a key underpinning of his utility's strategy.    They implemented major projects to cleanup their connectivity and other data.  Realizing that data quality is perishable, they also implemented a data governance policy and focused on improving business processes that produced bad data.  For example,  the processes for managing as-builts is major challenge for many utilities as I have blogged about on multiple occasions, most recently here.

Mobile workforce requirements
Navigant estimates that 60% of all electric utility employees work in the field on assets that have spatial attributes. It also points out that managing a field workforce is a significant challenge, when data including location about assets in the field are missing or incorrect.

Organizational challenges
Navigant sees the divide between the information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) sides of the business as an inhibitor to smart grid adoption. Navigant sees GIS as a critical technology to bringing these two sides of the business together.

Transforming the utiility GIS market
A critical factor is depth and quality of the skills, tools, and solutions that are available to support GIS-based applications . The traditional vendors in this space are Esri, Intergraph, Autodesk, Bentley, GE/Smallworld, and Oracle, but Navigant sees that the integration of IT and OT to support smart grid is going to transform the market through mergers and acquisitions.  The effect will be to dramatically increase the size of the market.

GIS has had limited implementation in smart grid applications such as SCADA, EMS, DMS, and advanced DMS(ADMS) and is in the innovator stage of adoption in this area.  Some of the technology developments in GIS-related applications that Navigant sees as becoming important include geospatial database developments relevant to utilities such as "real-time big data", cloud, mobility and communications technology, 3D, and remote sensing.

Spatial analytics

Navigant sees geospatial-related analytics (spatial analytics) as the key to the success of electric utility operations in the smart grid era. Geospatial data overlays to search for patterns and correlations between different land, weather, terrain, assets, and other types of geodata will be increasingly important for utilties. Power-related analytics with geospatial components include network tracing, load flow analysis, and real-time network analysis. Real-time and historical outage situational awareness, device failure and maintenance history, reliability, and vegetation management also require spatial analytics.

Geospatial data is also critical for analytics relating to long-term power system evolution. Analyzing structured and unstructured data sources to uncover patterns in the data isa  growing area but will require high performance computing to enable it to be applied in near real-time.

Navigant points out that one of the challenges is that many utilities have numerous siloed GISs and concludes that "GIS usage in smart grid applications will demand a high degree of accuracy and timely, synchronized updates, which will be difficult to orchestrate in a federated environment. Ultimately, utilities will have to implement a GIS repository of record that supports smart grid requirements."  To me this means that the stage is set for a transformation in how utilties use GIS that will make it a foundation for managing the smart grid and fully realizing the benefits of smart grid technology.

AU: Bringing the field into the office

One of the most important goals of utilities in this time of aging and shrinking workforces is improving the productivity of operations staff.  Many utilities are finding that many tasks that used to require sending staff into the field can now be done much more efficiently in the office.  I've blogged previously about obligue high resolution imagery from Pictometry, which has just released a plug-in for AutoCAD Map 3D.  

At the Utility Symposium at Autodesk University last week, David Petterson from Pictometry outlined some of the uses that utilities and local giovernments are finding for Pictometry's high resolution oblique imagery.   High resolution oblique imagery not only can provide orthophotography with resolution down to 4 inches (10 cm), but allows quantitative measurement in three dimensions.

Utility applications of oblique imagery

Using Pictometry imagery can provide greater coverage of right of ways and allows the utility to validate encroachments.  In many parts of the U.S. Pictometry provides historical data which can be used to pinpoint in time when the encroachment first occurred.  Tree heights and offsets to lines can also be measured.  Parcel owners can be identified and access points reviewed.

After storm events, Pictometry will refly locations that have suffered damage to provide a quick response to storm events.

Permitting is another important application area of oblique imagery.  Identifying, validating, and preparing preliminary designs are all areas where the imagery can help.

But most importantly, high resolution oblique imagery can reduce the number of field visits (truck rolls) and reduce the time required per visit for visits that cannot be avoided.  Oblique imagery means that everything above ground can be measured.  The lighting is always good and it's available 24/7.