An electrician crew assembles a conduit line for the new solar array being installed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, Dec. 14, 2018. The new array will increase the amount of renewable solar energy on base and provide an additional asset that will be incorporated into future micro grid planning. (U.S. Air Force photo by R. Nial Bradshaw)Ed: Geoff will be speaking in opening session of the upcoming GeoIgnite Virtual Canadian Underground Forum April 29 and 30, 2021. This event, focused on underground assets may be based in Canada, but it has international presenters, agenda and flavor; the issues and challenges of the underground are universal.
Several years ago, a widely read McKinsey report showed that large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile. McKinsey concluded that one reason is that construction had been slow to adopt process and technological innovations.
Among the five technologies identified by McKinsey that it believed would be transformative in the digitalization of the construction industry were geospatial technologies and building information modeling (BIM). Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years with significant benefits. While from the beginning of BIM in the UK, the UK government has said that “...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life cycle“, until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
One of areas in construction that is seeing rapid digitalization is detecting and mapping underground infrastructure. By way of context the Federal Highway Administration reports that underground utilities are a leading cause of highway construction project delays. In the last few years there have been important advances in digital technology for detecting, mapping, reality capture and cloud-based sharing of underground infrastructure location data. It is indicative of the growing private investment in these technologies is that almost all of these innovations are being developed by and being brought to market by start-ups. Leaders of several of these start-ups which have developed innovative underground technology including Joseph Hlady President of Lux Modus, Page Tucker President and CEO of Prostar, and Otto Ballintijn CEO of Reduct will be talking about their approaches to developing technology and bringing it to market at the GeoIgnite Virtual Canadian Underground Forum April 29 and 30, 2021.
In the area of detection Advances in ground penetrating radar (GPR) now make it possible to safely capture scans at roadway speeds and software developments are enabling surveyors to use GPR technology effectively. LiDAR combined with accurate GNSS is being applied to efficiently capture the location of newly installed underground pipelines. Inertial or gyro mapping can be used to accurately map underground pipe networks. A very recent development has demonstrated that magnetometers and high accuracy GNSS can be mounted on a drone to accurately map underground pipe networks much more rapidly and safely than traditional pushcart methods which “boots on the pavement.” A major challenge has been the cost-effective capture of the location of new infrastructure as well as underground utilities exposed during construction.
In the last few years new reality capture technology enables the creation of accurate as-builts from videos taken with an Android smartphone. Mixed reality applications for visualizing underground utilities on mobile devices are increasingly being deployed to the field. These not only enable visualizing above and belowground infrastructure, but also allows accurate measurement of positions and distances between objects. Existing 2D and 3D records and site investigation results can be integrated in a 3D model that can be visualized in augmented reality on a handheld.
An important advance has been mobile and cloud-based systems for capturing and sharing information about the location of underground infrastructure among project stakeholders. For example, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has adopted a hybrid system that incorporates elements of survey and GIS technology and practices. Handheld mobile devices can be used to capture accurate location information during construction, the data is uploaded to the cloud enabling the information to be shared in near real time among CDOT, network operators and construction contractors’ users equipped with smartphones.
Given that damage to underground infrastructure during construction costs the U.S. economy tens of billions of dollars annually and that every construction site is potentially a disaster leading to injuries and fatalities, there is strong economic and social motivation to develop and improve the technologies available to reduce damage to underground utilities and other infrastructure. The rapid advance in the last few years in digital technologies for detecting and mapping underground infrastructure has the potential to dramatically reduce risk for public civil engineering projects and enable more projects to come in on schedule and on budget. In the longer term this has implications for reduced construction insurance rates for contractors, less expensive infrastructure projects and more bang for tax payer’s dollar.
