Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory China Energy Group have developed software to integrate building life-cycle assessment, energy use and emissions from construction of a housing development through to occupation. The aim was to model the building material lifecycle to track where the materials were produced and the emissions impacts of their transportation. The tool also takes into account the impacts of lifestyle choices of residents, including transit choices, consumer goods, food consumption and heating and cooling costs.

Read more about this tool on this World Changing blog post.

At last year’s SPAR Conference, ClearEdge3D’s automated extraction of CAD models from point clouds stood out from the crowd as a much needed tool to aid productivity. A telling story of the progression of the productivity shift that has happened with the advent of LIDAR tools is that in the past a large project may have needed five surveyors in the field with just one CAD operator. When tripod-mounted LIDAR arrived that shifted to one or two field workers, and five CAD jockeys back in the office. That further shifts with mobile LIDAR to one or two operators in the field and twenty back in the office. With this change to heavier data processing burdens, and the increasing volumes of data that accompany the more advanced collection tools and methods, there’s an obvious and glaring need for quicker and more automated processes.

The ClearEdge product fits neatly into this area, because it ingests point cloud data and automatically extracts 3D Cad models, which is often the primary workflow of a LIDAR project. Instead of gee-whiz technology this year, the emphasis of the company was on real-world applications and case studies. While the technology was being highlighted in the 3D Technologies track, users of the technology were discussing their use of the tools in their data capture workflows in the Scan to BIM conference track. The users repeatedly emphasized the time savings that they gained by adopting this automated data extraction tool.

Among the case studies that the company touted was an application by Stantec Engineering on a road and rail crossing project in one of the busiest intersections in Calgary. The constant flow of traffic meant that laser scanning was the only real option for data collection from both a safety and least amount of disruption perspective. The firm estimates that the ClearEdge tool pared down the time it tool to create the model from one week down to just four hours.

Another cased study was in the capture of a large federal building in Chicago by Ghafari Associated. There the adoption of the technology meant the elimination of redundant modeling steps to provide access to the data much more quickly. In this case, the time from scan to model was critical as the time to deliver the model was compressed. The scale and scope of this project was massive, with 500 scans of the building, and the delivery of a Revit model of the exterior and interior of the building complex.

In one year’s time, there were many more project examples across the board at this event. The company fought through the eastern snowstorms to make a delayed appearance at the event, and I’m sure they’re glad that they did. With their emphasis on productivity gains, with cost and time reductions on data processing, their product was very well received.

The worldwide architectural design firm HKS has been doing some impressive large-scale scan to BIM projects. The subject of a presentation at the SPAR Conference was 50 United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, a 360,000 s.f. federal building that was scanned and modeled in three weeks for retrofit preparation for a large federal client.

This detailed scan of a building on the historic register required some interesting feature manipulations in order to capture a suitable level of detail in a building with many detailed historical architectural elements. The size and detail of the building didn’t allow for full scan and representation of each element give file size limitations, so the model made use of some “jedi mind tricks” of visualization in order to aptly represent the building for the desired purpose of the model.

In all of the Scan to BIM sessions at the event, there’s a great degree of discussion about format and software manipulations. In a similar GSA project in Chicago, the team used no fewer than 14 different software packages and discussed a format workflow that includes COBIE, gbXML, IFC, DGN, DWG, etc.

HKS assigns one person as a controller of this complex process to facilitate and manage the manipulations of files and formats to develop a central integrated file. This person aptly holds the title of Data Wrangler.

Given the complexity of the tasks and the limitations of the software to capture and quickly render the level of details in such large models, it’s only a matter of time before more interoperability and performance are brought to bear on the problem. Until these issues are ironed out, any firm conducting such work should be prepared for data wrangling pains.

Alice Labs is a young company that began last year as a spin-off from university research in The Netherlands at the Technical University of Delft. They are focused on developing a toolset to enable users to get reality into the virtual world in high quality.

Studio Clouds is their product with a streaming engine that is designed to integrate with various software platforms, currently ported into 3DS Max and Maya with plug-ins. The tool allows the import of a wide variety of LIDAR data files. Below is a YouTube video that illustrates the capability.

PhotoStruct is a new product that they’re set to release that incorporates photogrammetry to create high density point clouds from just two images. After the calibration of the camera, the process just requires two images and the push of a button to render a high-definition color point cloud with texture and color in 15 minutes or so. The product will release next week, and will be available from the Alice Labs website.

Another product that will be released next week is Studio Clouds Registration, which allows you to register your clouds together, with cloud to cloud or target registration.

The company is focused on visual effects with the movie industry and gaming. They are also involved with forensics, archeologists with heritage sites, and with architects to render and visualize buildings.

The SPAR 2010 Conference kicked off last evening with some in-depth workshops and a Super Bowl reception. The program for this year’s event mixes a number of focus areas for technological advancement along with breakout sessions for key technology applications. In this hot technology area there’s a lot of buzz about improved workflows, and with this year’s event there’s a focus on key areas of opportunity.

Among the key application areas outlined with multi-day sessions are Mobile Surveying, Industrial Plant, Security Planning & Forensic and Scan to BIM. The diversity in application areas are supplemented with some interesting sessions on the cutting edge of technology advancement.

Stay tuned for more details from this event.

In a New York Times blog post today, design and architecture columnist Allison Arieff writes about the continued issue of empty space and inefficiency in our built world, pointing to GIS as an answer to solve these issues.

“G.I.S. allows us to literally view our place both globally and in a hyperlocal context. That level of specificity, both at the micro and macro level, is helping revolutionize the way we think about, plan for and design the space we inhabit (or abandon). A visual map can show us patterns of overbuilding, abandonment, mis- (or lack of) use; it can teach us something about our current tendency to overbuild.”

This article reinforces the gaining prominence of GIS within the design community as a means to understand the whole, and to pull together patterns and discrepancies in the larger urban fabric. There appears to be a groundswell of interest in better planning and design as our cities become more and more important to how we live. This article concludes that the coming age of data-driven design will usher in more dynamic and flexible planning.

Having attended Autodesk University in Las Vegas this week, I’m immersed in the idea of model-based design. The concept is a paradigm shift for the AEC community as it breaks free of the drawing-oriented design process toward an intelligent model that informs all phases of a building’s life and is acted upon by all of the disciplines that are involved in the process. The idea that informs this is Building Information Modeling (BIM), which is basically a GIS for a building. BIM introduces a database to store all details and components of the building as well as the domain knowledge of a team of collaborators.

GIS has always been about the aggregation of policy-oriented details about our planet. The very first GIS, the Canadian Geographic Information System, was a necessary step to pull together nationwide-scale land use planning by the central government to inform social, economic and environmental decisions. As such, the GIS became the repository of details about agricultural suitability, the details about natural resources exploitation and management, and a means to gauge the demographics of the populace as well as the potential impacts of policy decisions on society.

In much the same way that BIM is about extending the collaboration process to make the best possible building as a holistic design exercise, GIS has the same process and outcome for crafting and managing policy for a better and more efficient society. The extension of this concept is that we can begin to build global best practice approaches for eradicating poverty, managing our resources, stewarding our environment in a way that preserves biodiversity, and adapting together to the climate and resource scarcity issues that face our finite planet.

The concept of GIS addresses all elements of living most efficiently on our planet. GIS informs policy, manages policy implementation, monitors policy effectiveness, and provides the means of communicating policy success. In much the same way that BIM will revolutionize the building design, construction and management industry, GIS has and will continue to transform the effective creation, administration and accountability issues related to public policy.

It’s interesting to witness the number of large engineering firms that have adopted geospatial technology into their project planning and implementation workflows, making great inroads and profits in the past five to ten years. A growing number of engineering firms are applying GIS to large architecture/engineering and construction projects that include infrastructure design, environmental planning, facilities management, corridor planning, residential and commercial development master plans, and natural resource management.

The original intent of most of these firms was to diversify themselves to keep a healthy amount of projects coming their way. While they may have only adopted the technology to meet specific project needs to begin with, many have retooled their operations over time to integrate the technology into all aspects of project workflow. What many of these firms discovered is that geospatial improves their internal processes to drive down their own costs while also driving down project costs for their clients.

Firms of Note

The firm that prompted this exploration is CH2M Hill, which this week made the announcement that they’ve sold off their Enterprise Management Solutions division to form a new firm called Critigen. With this announcement we learned that this division of the company has been growing at an accelerated pace of 20 percent each of the past three years, and is set to make similar double-digit gains this year despite the damaged economy.

It’s great to see that there’s such sustained growth in this sector. There area  a number of large engineering firms that have been applying geospatial tools to their projects for some time. I think of PB, Michael Baker, Woolpert, CDM, Arup, Stantec, Tata, EDAW, Timmons Group and the like. Many of these companies are multi-national conglomerates that do work all over the world, therefore these examples are at the top tier and scale of projects. There are also plenty of smaller international and regional players that are doing this type of work as well.

Cultural Differences

The full vision of a GIS-centric system for the management of large-scale projects throughout their lifecycle is being accomplished at these firms, but there are still many barriers that need to be overcome for maximum efficiency. In such projects there are the surveyors who do base mapping, the planners, designers and engineers that typically use CAD tools, and a GIS department that tries to weave all of this data together. There are cultural differences among these different practitioners, and also issues of scale and coordinate reference that sometimes cause stumbling blocks at different phases of project development.

With such a large market at stake, the software developers in the CAD and GIS field are applying considerable resources to solve the various stumbling blocks. There are inroads in interoperability between vendors, the adoption of document management and central data repositories, and the addition of design functionality within GIS. The technical challenges are also being addressed by individual firms that work to further streamline their operations and differentiate themselves from competitors through technology expertise.

Driving Developments

Some of the firms that have shown the greatest innovation in the geospatial engineering area have been those that have applied a great deal of process engineering to the tool integration problem. There are a number of tools out there that help a firm combine all of their drawing and other geospatial data into a central repository for better project management.

Database tools such as Oracle Spatial provide a common repository as well as tools to reference and retrieve all means of geospatial data. There are also tailored document management tools for CAD and GIS such as Bentley’s ProjectWise that have cover all manner of collaborative and content management tools to manage all project phases. The central data store provides the point of integration that addresses the different approaches of the various practitioners, and becomes a focal point for further development to better streamline operations.

Recurring Theme

There have been several other sectors where companies with deep application knowledge have harnessed geospatial technology. In fact, there’s been a progression of hot areas over the time that I’ve been involved in the Industry. When I started my geospatial career the companies that applied the technology to utility asset management were hot, closely followed by the forestry, natural resources and agriculture sector. From there the defense sector exploded. Recently there’s been a focus on infrastructure, and the areas of sustainability planning and implementation is growing strong.

The trend of the thriving technology integrator is an ongoing phenomena. It makes sense that as the technology and markets have matured there have been companies to pull together different tools to create targeted solutions that play off of their domain expertise. Those that are the best at this difficult task seem to gain a lion’s share of the projects over time that leave a solid core of a dozen or so domain experts.

It’s amazing to me that within just three or four years CH2M Hill grew a division of 700 plus people that dealt primarily with the application of geospatial technology. This example clearly illustrates a pent-up demand, and the power of geospatial technology to grow a company’s bottom line in the applied technology space.

While some of the work in the geoengineering sector has slowed due to the downturn in the economy, there are a growing number of government-led projects that will take good advantage of this built up capacity. Stimulus funds are starting to be spent in areas of Smart Grid development, renewable energy siting, corridor planning, carbon accounting, climate change planning and many areas of environmental consulting.The future is certainly bright for firms addressing these areas, and all geospatial practitioners stand to benefit by the pressure that this group places on better surveying, CAD and GIS integration.

References

Bringing GIS and Engineering Departments Closer Together, Charlie Crocker, Between the Poles Blog, June 5, 2006

GIS in Engineering, 2003 ESRI/UC Proceedings, Jennifer Redmund and Noah Benedict, The TSR Group

Perhaps you’ve seen the IBM, CISCO and General Electric ads and dialogue regarding Smart Infrastructure. These initiatives are aimed at combining infrastructure maintenance and management with communications and sensors, and the New York Times just published a piece that likens the market opportunity to all of the Internet.

“In the mid-1990s, the Internet took off because its technological time had come. Years of steady progress in developing more powerful and less expensive computers, Web software and faster communications links finally came together. A similar pattern is emerging today, experts say, for what is being called smart infrastructure.”

The beauty of this movement is the focus on environmental benefits, and innovations that breed enhanced efficiency.  The highest profile effort here is the smart grid, a plan to greatly improve electric transmission, but the opportunity also extends to include intelligent transportation, improved distribution, streamlined commuter traffic, and better water management. At present these efforts are largely within the applied research arms of these large technology integrators, but the opportunity will expand to perhaps support an entire industry unto itself.

Clearly smart infrastructure relies heavily on geographic information systems as a foundational piece, and some geospatial industry players are clearly focused on this opportunity. It will be interesting to follow the developments to see new alliances form and new solutions come to market.

This all sounds so familiar, as we’ve been focused on this potential since we started V1 Magazine. It’s nice to see the growing momentum and the umbrella term of smart infrastructure emerge.