Wellington City Council, New Zealand, has approved an initiative to build an updateable digital map, recording where all of the underground pipes and cables are beneath the city’s roads and footpaths. The goal is to build a system and support compliance policies that can be scaled up for the whole of New Zealand.
The Wellington Underground Asset Map (WUAM) programme will revolutionise the way buried infrastructure like Three Waters assets, telecommunications cables, gas pipes and other services are installed, maintained, operated and repaired.
The programme aims to reduce disruption to the capital’s streets by moving away from legacy records and outdated paper processes to a centralised online map-based library. It could form the start of a long journey towards a digital twin of the infrastructure under the city’s streets.
“Over the next few decades, billions of dollars will be spent on infrastructure projects around the city, including water, electricity, Let’s Get Wellington Moving, cycleways and Council capital projects like the Te Matapihi Central Library and housing developments,” said Siobhan Procter, chief infrastructure officer.
According to the council, the objective of the programme is to develop a federated data-sharing platform showing subsurface infrastructure owned by the council and other utility operators. These users will feed their data into this platform that everyone who works in the sector can access 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“The Wellington Underground Asset Map will play a central role in making sure the variety of projects remain on track – reducing the impact on Wellingtonians and helping the city continue to function as we focus on making the city a great place to live, work and play,” added Proctor.
