GISdevelopment.net --> Application --> Corporate Case Studies
Abstract
Every country in the world is into heavy urbanization with the passage of each decade or even each year and every Asian country is very much towards this fact. The urban planning programs have a major influence on national economy, society and environment of any country all over the world. It also means managing the constant and rapid change and helping the societies to manage that change. To achieve this goal better, it requires an efficient tool that can analysis the existing systems in a holistic manner. GIS, as everyone knows is the proven technology for such a process.
This paper emphasizes on moving the GIS technology towards a much better urban infrastructure planning and development using the state of art solutions from Bentley. This involves some key objectives as Handling diversity with Federated Information Management, Modeling the real world with full 3D, Allowing multi-disciplinary team to use best of breed tools with collaboration in their projects, Embracing open systems with global standards, Leveraging the Google Earth to share information across.
The technology here also is about creating an environment where GIS and CAD and various engineering Applications are integrated allowing engineers and Planners to Plan, analyze, design, and do facilities management. This achieves the goal of the holistic analysis in any urban planning process. It is also about enabling various departments to work in a connected mode so that redundancies and duplicities are avoided and providing the right information to the right people at the right time.
Introduction
Infrastructure is very hard to do whether it’s about building the Roads, rails, bridges, Water Networks or Electric networks. It requires lot of team members, lot of information to be generated, requires lot of co-ordination and it is difficult for quite a few reasons. Essentially there are three reasons that makes infrastructure unique from everything else we do in the modern life. They are Infrastructure is there for a long time. So it is not inconceivable that to have built something that will 75 to 100 years. Definitely, we do not build roads that last for just 5 years. This forms the first uniqueness. We do have some great examples of such infrastructure which are longer than hundred years. The Rome Coliseum is more than two thousand years old and is still being used and expanded. The other is the Cloaca Maxima a 2,000 year-old sewer in Rome that is still carrying away wastewater to the Tiber. It is typical for an asset to be around for 50 -75 years and the information that was used to build it, must still be used. On the other hand, we do change our high tech electronic gadgets in every 18 months time because the change is huge in the life cycle of these gadgets unlike the infrastructure.
Fig: The Rome Coliseum and the Cloaca Maxima Sewer.
The second unique property is that the information used to build these assets is the most detailed information on the asset that will ever exist. If you think about it, you know more about the asset from the design and construction documentation than you do once it is built. Additionally this information needs to survive for the lifecycle of the asset. Again, if you loose the documentation of a electronic gadget, it is going to affect one for maximum of two years and the there is always going to be new model. This can not be said in the case of a Electrical/Water/Sewer networks So once the authority built there water network and dig up street and put it in and once the street has been created over it, they need the document to do something over it again. It’s very hard to get these or becomes very difficult to find them. Since the infrastructure is around there for a very long time, these document becomes critically important to manage the asset or to make any expansion work in it and to make sure that the service it gives is adequate.
The third thing that makes infrastructure very different is that the supply chain in building the asset. Especially the people who build a particular asset typically move to another project. Again its different from the gadget example. The supply chain in the life cycle of those gadgets is essentially three months and hence the people, document etc are very much available for any purpose. This is not true in the case of an infrastructure. Like roads, rail, electric network etc. The people who had built these are mostly not there or disappeared. It is because of these reasons it becomes critically important to do these things right.
It sounds clear that given all the challenges we discussed above about the traditional approach of GIS for infrastructure needs to be re-thought. It does not mean that GIS does not give anything, GIS has given us a lot of good things when it comes to demographic, social or environmental analysis, resource management. But when it comes to how it is used in infrastructure we need to do better. Bentley believes that there some drivers that really driving this change of advancing the GIS for infrastructure. In this paper we also look at some of the technologies, which some people used to solve these problems with the technology.
Drivers of Change.
From the above discussions, it can be said that there are as many as six areas driving change for GIS in Infrastructure. They are
Diversity: The most obvious fact about the infrastructure is that the documentation that is used to build them is very diverse and heterogeneous in nature. To build any infrastructure, it spans Engineering and construction (AEC), it spans GIS data to generate environmental reports, it spans RDBMS data it even spans Microsoft documents like word document and Excel spread sheets to track payments etc.
There is always the need to quickly find that documentation to use them in some expansion work or managing the asset. Various studies have shown that we can waste as much as 20%-30% of any given resources time trying to find the right thing. It is also difficult at best to transform all of the information into one format. It has proven impractical, for example, to put ALL this diverse information into ONE database
There needs to be a better way of looking to solve this problem and the solution is Federated Information Management and we can look at the search engines and Google in particular for inspiration. We all know how difficult the life was before Google. It has made a paradigm shift in the way we work. With the few key words, it can bring you the relevant information in front of you in no time and I am ready already to start the research. This kind of a paradigm shift is something we can look at in GIS for infrastructure. What Google has shown us is the power of indexing. Google does not store all the web pages on the Web in their database they just pick up some key word from the website and index the relevant information and then it can be searched easily. In the same way for infrastructure, there is much data that can be stored in a GIS database BUT there is much data that cannot be easily transformed to fit that paradigm. Hence the question is why spending time and money in transforming the information, when one can index the information and leave them in it s native form and be able to find it quickly. Creating infrastructure requires all sorts of files and data types that are uniquely adapted to those workflows. What we need to do is spatially index that information, along with the information in the GIS database so it can be found where ever it is and presented in a coherent way.
Modelling Reality -3D : This one is pretty much intuitive. We live in a 3D world everyday which is not flat. Hence 3D is obviously a better representation in a reality than a 2D fat map. The other problem with the 2D map is that it makes just a symbolic representation of the reality. But 3D makes us move away from symbolic representation to Geometric reality which is the true picture. Infrastructure is better represented in 3D since it actually exists in 3D. It gives better understanding of the infrastructure in it. So the 3D models become the new base map and infrastructure assets of all kinds populate and extend that map. It increases the productivity. It also improves the accuracy and the quality of the decisions. Hence if your GIS can not handle proper 3D, it is not probably appropriate for infrastructure
Multi-disciplinary projects: The third driver discusses about the fact that one can not build a model of infrastructure without a lot of people who are highly skilled and from different disciplines. It is unproductive to ask that all these team members to use a ONE technology or they can’t participate in the project. These team members are very specialized in certain tools and highly productive in that. So in order to use GIS for infrastructure, we need a technology infrastructure that allows team members to use their most productive tools but provides access to the information they create to all the other team members enabling collaborations and synthesis. So that people can create data and synthesis data from other users independent of the application they use. We need to learn how to live in a heterogeneous world. It is real life after all. Again if your GIS don’t do this, it is sure going to be tough for such multi-disciplinary projects.
Openness: The fourth driver is not unique to GIS in Infrastructure. It is a worldwide trend in software, and the geo community needs to take heed and deliver interoperability and work with open standards. In general the users are getting sophisticated about what is valuable to them which is actually not the application software but the data they built over years and years. So it is very important that the data is stored where and in what format. This also makes it clear that the single vendor proprietary systems are out as it will be difficult, time and money consuming to make it use with another application. Also with the fact that the infrastructure is there for a long time and which is very long time for computer science. So it is important to have data in standards where the value of the data is kept current over a longer period of time. The open standards like OGC, GML, and XML that will allow you to hold the value of the data.
There are also some “de facto” standards such as Oracle 10g Spatial, PDF, Google etc. These become de-facto standards just because of the fact that they are very widespread all over the world. And when I say support Oracle Spatial I mean the vendor community needs to make it absolutely transparent to any application that wants to use the data. Now that Oracle has introduced data models for Topology and Networks this becomes even more obvious.
Hence if your GIS don’t allow you sold the data in such open standards and given that the infrastructure is there for a long time and also very heterogeneous, then it’s going to put you in a very uncomfortable situation.
Engineering Users: The next driver means that, infrastructure is a lot to do with engineering. Infrastructure is not a GIS problem but mostly an Engineering problem. In the last 20 years we have gotten into a vicious trap driven by the adoption of CAD by engineers on one side and the adoption of GIS tools by planners on the other side we have created an artificial boundary.
So we have gotten into the trap where planning is done in one system, analysis in another, design in yet another and facilities management in yet another. It creates all kinds of unnecessary friction and waste. This divide exists today and interoperability is trying to solve this problem.
In a long term, what we need is an environment where, for example, a water system can be planned, the hydraulic analysis executed, the construction drawings generated and the ongoing operation done from within one environment that is both GIS friendly and “engineering friendly”.
Workflow: There is so much we can do with making desktop applications more productive and Bentley is also working on making their desktop application more productive from which you can gain a lot. What is becoming increasingly obvious is that there is a REAL difference between focusing on tasks and focusing on workflow. Focusing on tasks is primarily about individual productivity and it has become increasingly difficult to get an order of magnitude improvement. Focusing on tasks also encourages data silos and creation of proprietary data which results in currency and synchronizations issues.
Focusing on workflow on the other hand still has the potential of yielding order of magnitude productivity improvements. So focusing on workflow from end to end in an organization by leveraging federated information management, environments that allow integration and synthesis and comprehensive change management, can yield substantial results. Obviously this is where we should be heading.
Hence if your GIS system can’t really participate in this kind of pushing information forward and backward then its very difficult to get that kind of workflow.
Bentley’s Solution to these problems:
Now let’s look into how Bentley is handling these problems with specific products and how to bring these ideas to something that is workable that you can adopt today.
The above product framework starts with Bentley Geospatial desktop. The Geospatial Desktop delivers GIS functionality in the infrastructure context. This has a full 3D environment for sophisticated modeling, feature modeling of you geospatial data through the XFM technology, has extensive data management capabilities including projection management, access to geospatial data in a seamless paradigm, allows for spatial analysis and reporting. Direct support of Oracle Spatial without the need for a server component. The oracle support allows for editing, versions and supports the new Oracle topology model.
Building on the Geospatial Desktop are the Geospatial Industry Applications.
These are much focused, extremely productive environments for specific industry workflows. There are applications for Cartography, Cadastres, Communications Networks, and Utility Networks. This avoids the discontinuities of having to go to different systems when going from one phase to the other.
If one stopped after adopting these two product categories, you would have an extremely productive environment. BUT Bentley can do better by going to the next step and that would be the adoption of the Bentley Geospatial Server. This adds a whole lot of functionalities like workflow management, change management, map publishing, work orders, disconnected workflows but would like to focus on a few items.
Firstly, this is where the magic of federated information management happens. The server allows the user to index, search and report on document and databases and on the features and business data that they contain. So Bentley just doesn’t index the document itself but also the information contained in it. The server also provides for an intuitive map interface to navigate the results of your searches. The next one is that, the server provides simultaneous multi-user editing greatly enhancing the functionality provided by only using the desktop. Finally the server supports spatial stores that are appropriate for infrastructure within the context of federated information management and multi-user editing.
It is now time to look at how we can leverage that infrastructure information and enhance the productivity of the whole organization. The first step is to integrate into Enterprise systems. Enterprise integration supports both to retrieve information and to push it back to corporate GIS’s, Work Management Systems, Operational Support Systems, and provides a framework for support of any other business data store you might have.
Next in organizational productivity Bentley want to look at is Mobile applications. Bentley provides a platform for mobile applications and it will as well provide industry specific mobile applications. The mobile applications will work in conjunction with the Geospatial Desktop, the industry applications or with the Geospatial Server. The Bentley mobile platform allows for fast, configurable display of industry standards
Conclusion: - Moving GIS for Infrastructure:
So Moving Infrastructure means for us is that
As this great concept comes to a black and white reality, the whole of acknowledgement and the credit goes to Mr. Styli Camateros, Vice President, Bentley Geospatial for actually seeding this concept in us. My sincere gratitude to Manoj Jain, Alex Chew, Veronica and other fellow colleagues in the Bentley Civil and geospatial team in South Asia for all their help and support in finishing this paper.
References:
Moving GIS for Urban Infrastructure
M. Rajathurai
Bentley Systems India Pvt Ltd
City Towers, # 117, Thiagaraya Road, T.Nagar
Chennai. India – 600 017.
Tel: +91 44 28154620
Fax: +91 44 28154621
m.rajathurai@bentley.com
M. Rajathurai
Bentley Systems India Pvt Ltd
City Towers, # 117, Thiagaraya Road, T.Nagar
Chennai. India – 600 017.
Tel: +91 44 28154620
Fax: +91 44 28154621
m.rajathurai@bentley.com
Abstract
Every country in the world is into heavy urbanization with the passage of each decade or even each year and every Asian country is very much towards this fact. The urban planning programs have a major influence on national economy, society and environment of any country all over the world. It also means managing the constant and rapid change and helping the societies to manage that change. To achieve this goal better, it requires an efficient tool that can analysis the existing systems in a holistic manner. GIS, as everyone knows is the proven technology for such a process.
This paper emphasizes on moving the GIS technology towards a much better urban infrastructure planning and development using the state of art solutions from Bentley. This involves some key objectives as Handling diversity with Federated Information Management, Modeling the real world with full 3D, Allowing multi-disciplinary team to use best of breed tools with collaboration in their projects, Embracing open systems with global standards, Leveraging the Google Earth to share information across.
The technology here also is about creating an environment where GIS and CAD and various engineering Applications are integrated allowing engineers and Planners to Plan, analyze, design, and do facilities management. This achieves the goal of the holistic analysis in any urban planning process. It is also about enabling various departments to work in a connected mode so that redundancies and duplicities are avoided and providing the right information to the right people at the right time.
Introduction
Infrastructure is very hard to do whether it’s about building the Roads, rails, bridges, Water Networks or Electric networks. It requires lot of team members, lot of information to be generated, requires lot of co-ordination and it is difficult for quite a few reasons. Essentially there are three reasons that makes infrastructure unique from everything else we do in the modern life. They are Infrastructure is there for a long time. So it is not inconceivable that to have built something that will 75 to 100 years. Definitely, we do not build roads that last for just 5 years. This forms the first uniqueness. We do have some great examples of such infrastructure which are longer than hundred years. The Rome Coliseum is more than two thousand years old and is still being used and expanded. The other is the Cloaca Maxima a 2,000 year-old sewer in Rome that is still carrying away wastewater to the Tiber. It is typical for an asset to be around for 50 -75 years and the information that was used to build it, must still be used. On the other hand, we do change our high tech electronic gadgets in every 18 months time because the change is huge in the life cycle of these gadgets unlike the infrastructure.
Fig: The Rome Coliseum and the Cloaca Maxima Sewer.
The second unique property is that the information used to build these assets is the most detailed information on the asset that will ever exist. If you think about it, you know more about the asset from the design and construction documentation than you do once it is built. Additionally this information needs to survive for the lifecycle of the asset. Again, if you loose the documentation of a electronic gadget, it is going to affect one for maximum of two years and the there is always going to be new model. This can not be said in the case of a Electrical/Water/Sewer networks So once the authority built there water network and dig up street and put it in and once the street has been created over it, they need the document to do something over it again. It’s very hard to get these or becomes very difficult to find them. Since the infrastructure is around there for a very long time, these document becomes critically important to manage the asset or to make any expansion work in it and to make sure that the service it gives is adequate.
The third thing that makes infrastructure very different is that the supply chain in building the asset. Especially the people who build a particular asset typically move to another project. Again its different from the gadget example. The supply chain in the life cycle of those gadgets is essentially three months and hence the people, document etc are very much available for any purpose. This is not true in the case of an infrastructure. Like roads, rail, electric network etc. The people who had built these are mostly not there or disappeared. It is because of these reasons it becomes critically important to do these things right.
It sounds clear that given all the challenges we discussed above about the traditional approach of GIS for infrastructure needs to be re-thought. It does not mean that GIS does not give anything, GIS has given us a lot of good things when it comes to demographic, social or environmental analysis, resource management. But when it comes to how it is used in infrastructure we need to do better. Bentley believes that there some drivers that really driving this change of advancing the GIS for infrastructure. In this paper we also look at some of the technologies, which some people used to solve these problems with the technology.
Drivers of Change.
From the above discussions, it can be said that there are as many as six areas driving change for GIS in Infrastructure. They are
- Diversity
- Modeling Reality – 3D
- Multi-disciplinary projects
- Openness
- Engineering users
- Workflow
Diversity: The most obvious fact about the infrastructure is that the documentation that is used to build them is very diverse and heterogeneous in nature. To build any infrastructure, it spans Engineering and construction (AEC), it spans GIS data to generate environmental reports, it spans RDBMS data it even spans Microsoft documents like word document and Excel spread sheets to track payments etc.
There is always the need to quickly find that documentation to use them in some expansion work or managing the asset. Various studies have shown that we can waste as much as 20%-30% of any given resources time trying to find the right thing. It is also difficult at best to transform all of the information into one format. It has proven impractical, for example, to put ALL this diverse information into ONE database
There needs to be a better way of looking to solve this problem and the solution is Federated Information Management and we can look at the search engines and Google in particular for inspiration. We all know how difficult the life was before Google. It has made a paradigm shift in the way we work. With the few key words, it can bring you the relevant information in front of you in no time and I am ready already to start the research. This kind of a paradigm shift is something we can look at in GIS for infrastructure. What Google has shown us is the power of indexing. Google does not store all the web pages on the Web in their database they just pick up some key word from the website and index the relevant information and then it can be searched easily. In the same way for infrastructure, there is much data that can be stored in a GIS database BUT there is much data that cannot be easily transformed to fit that paradigm. Hence the question is why spending time and money in transforming the information, when one can index the information and leave them in it s native form and be able to find it quickly. Creating infrastructure requires all sorts of files and data types that are uniquely adapted to those workflows. What we need to do is spatially index that information, along with the information in the GIS database so it can be found where ever it is and presented in a coherent way.
Modelling Reality -3D : This one is pretty much intuitive. We live in a 3D world everyday which is not flat. Hence 3D is obviously a better representation in a reality than a 2D fat map. The other problem with the 2D map is that it makes just a symbolic representation of the reality. But 3D makes us move away from symbolic representation to Geometric reality which is the true picture. Infrastructure is better represented in 3D since it actually exists in 3D. It gives better understanding of the infrastructure in it. So the 3D models become the new base map and infrastructure assets of all kinds populate and extend that map. It increases the productivity. It also improves the accuracy and the quality of the decisions. Hence if your GIS can not handle proper 3D, it is not probably appropriate for infrastructure
Multi-disciplinary projects: The third driver discusses about the fact that one can not build a model of infrastructure without a lot of people who are highly skilled and from different disciplines. It is unproductive to ask that all these team members to use a ONE technology or they can’t participate in the project. These team members are very specialized in certain tools and highly productive in that. So in order to use GIS for infrastructure, we need a technology infrastructure that allows team members to use their most productive tools but provides access to the information they create to all the other team members enabling collaborations and synthesis. So that people can create data and synthesis data from other users independent of the application they use. We need to learn how to live in a heterogeneous world. It is real life after all. Again if your GIS don’t do this, it is sure going to be tough for such multi-disciplinary projects.
Openness: The fourth driver is not unique to GIS in Infrastructure. It is a worldwide trend in software, and the geo community needs to take heed and deliver interoperability and work with open standards. In general the users are getting sophisticated about what is valuable to them which is actually not the application software but the data they built over years and years. So it is very important that the data is stored where and in what format. This also makes it clear that the single vendor proprietary systems are out as it will be difficult, time and money consuming to make it use with another application. Also with the fact that the infrastructure is there for a long time and which is very long time for computer science. So it is important to have data in standards where the value of the data is kept current over a longer period of time. The open standards like OGC, GML, and XML that will allow you to hold the value of the data.
There are also some “de facto” standards such as Oracle 10g Spatial, PDF, Google etc. These become de-facto standards just because of the fact that they are very widespread all over the world. And when I say support Oracle Spatial I mean the vendor community needs to make it absolutely transparent to any application that wants to use the data. Now that Oracle has introduced data models for Topology and Networks this becomes even more obvious.
Hence if your GIS don’t allow you sold the data in such open standards and given that the infrastructure is there for a long time and also very heterogeneous, then it’s going to put you in a very uncomfortable situation.
Engineering Users: The next driver means that, infrastructure is a lot to do with engineering. Infrastructure is not a GIS problem but mostly an Engineering problem. In the last 20 years we have gotten into a vicious trap driven by the adoption of CAD by engineers on one side and the adoption of GIS tools by planners on the other side we have created an artificial boundary.
So we have gotten into the trap where planning is done in one system, analysis in another, design in yet another and facilities management in yet another. It creates all kinds of unnecessary friction and waste. This divide exists today and interoperability is trying to solve this problem.
In a long term, what we need is an environment where, for example, a water system can be planned, the hydraulic analysis executed, the construction drawings generated and the ongoing operation done from within one environment that is both GIS friendly and “engineering friendly”.
Workflow: There is so much we can do with making desktop applications more productive and Bentley is also working on making their desktop application more productive from which you can gain a lot. What is becoming increasingly obvious is that there is a REAL difference between focusing on tasks and focusing on workflow. Focusing on tasks is primarily about individual productivity and it has become increasingly difficult to get an order of magnitude improvement. Focusing on tasks also encourages data silos and creation of proprietary data which results in currency and synchronizations issues.
Focusing on workflow on the other hand still has the potential of yielding order of magnitude productivity improvements. So focusing on workflow from end to end in an organization by leveraging federated information management, environments that allow integration and synthesis and comprehensive change management, can yield substantial results. Obviously this is where we should be heading.
Hence if your GIS system can’t really participate in this kind of pushing information forward and backward then its very difficult to get that kind of workflow.
Bentley’s Solution to these problems:
Now let’s look into how Bentley is handling these problems with specific products and how to bring these ideas to something that is workable that you can adopt today.
The above product framework starts with Bentley Geospatial desktop. The Geospatial Desktop delivers GIS functionality in the infrastructure context. This has a full 3D environment for sophisticated modeling, feature modeling of you geospatial data through the XFM technology, has extensive data management capabilities including projection management, access to geospatial data in a seamless paradigm, allows for spatial analysis and reporting. Direct support of Oracle Spatial without the need for a server component. The oracle support allows for editing, versions and supports the new Oracle topology model.
Building on the Geospatial Desktop are the Geospatial Industry Applications.
These are much focused, extremely productive environments for specific industry workflows. There are applications for Cartography, Cadastres, Communications Networks, and Utility Networks. This avoids the discontinuities of having to go to different systems when going from one phase to the other.
If one stopped after adopting these two product categories, you would have an extremely productive environment. BUT Bentley can do better by going to the next step and that would be the adoption of the Bentley Geospatial Server. This adds a whole lot of functionalities like workflow management, change management, map publishing, work orders, disconnected workflows but would like to focus on a few items.
Firstly, this is where the magic of federated information management happens. The server allows the user to index, search and report on document and databases and on the features and business data that they contain. So Bentley just doesn’t index the document itself but also the information contained in it. The server also provides for an intuitive map interface to navigate the results of your searches. The next one is that, the server provides simultaneous multi-user editing greatly enhancing the functionality provided by only using the desktop. Finally the server supports spatial stores that are appropriate for infrastructure within the context of federated information management and multi-user editing.
It is now time to look at how we can leverage that infrastructure information and enhance the productivity of the whole organization. The first step is to integrate into Enterprise systems. Enterprise integration supports both to retrieve information and to push it back to corporate GIS’s, Work Management Systems, Operational Support Systems, and provides a framework for support of any other business data store you might have.
Next in organizational productivity Bentley want to look at is Mobile applications. Bentley provides a platform for mobile applications and it will as well provide industry specific mobile applications. The mobile applications will work in conjunction with the Geospatial Desktop, the industry applications or with the Geospatial Server. The Bentley mobile platform allows for fast, configurable display of industry standards
Conclusion: - Moving GIS for Infrastructure:
So Moving Infrastructure means for us is that
- handling diversity with Federated Information Management,
- modeling the real world with full 3D,
- allowing multi-disciplinary team to use best of breed tools with collaboration in their projects,
- embracing open systems with standards such as OGC and de-facto standards such Oracle 10g Spatial, PDF and Google Earth
- Creating an environment where GIS and CAD functionality are integrated allowing engineering users Plan, analyze, design, and do facilities management
- Focus on workflow for the whole enterprise.
As this great concept comes to a black and white reality, the whole of acknowledgement and the credit goes to Mr. Styli Camateros, Vice President, Bentley Geospatial for actually seeding this concept in us. My sincere gratitude to Manoj Jain, Alex Chew, Veronica and other fellow colleagues in the Bentley Civil and geospatial team in South Asia for all their help and support in finishing this paper.
References:
- Bentley Systems User Stories, available at
http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Markets/Geospatial/User+Stories/User+Story+Summaries.htm#Geospatial - Bentley Geospatial, Seminars, available at ; www.bentley.com.
- Ashish Arora; “GIS as Decision Support system for Urban Planning,” GIS development article.