When we think about large-scale infrastructure projects like a new highway or rail system, it’s understandably the final result that we usually think about, even in the context of the project’s progress. It’s the building of the end result that we picture during the construction process, and the modeling of that end result that becomes the focus of the design process.
However, anyone who works on these kinds of horizontal projects – and vertical ones, too – knows that the subsurface is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. A lack of knowledge of what utilities are underground and exactly where they are located is consistently a major problem for these projects, leading to strikes that result in major cost overruns in the best-case scenario, and potentially dangerous situations for workers and the local community.
As such, there is an increasing amount of focus being put on locating and mapping these subsurface utilities, with geospatial data forming a crucial basis for this work. In a recent conversation with Geo Week News, Philip Meis and Daniel Colby – President and Senior VP of Technology, respectively, with Utility Mapping Services (UMS) – spoke about the importance of utilities work to these projects and how they’re trying to change attitudes around their mapping.
“They get to approve the design without even knowing what’s underneath. They call them utility conflicts,” Colby said. “We’re trying to change that mindset. They’re not really utility conflicts, they’re design conflicts because the utilities were already there.”
In addition to talking about their work with UMS and the utilities industry in general, Meis and Colby discussed a 2023 report from the Iowa Department of Transportation entitled Modernizing Utility Infrastructure Management in which they looked at this very issue. The report dives into the current state of subsurface utility management and how this can be rectified. As pointed out in the report and elsewhere, a lot of utility data today is based on old records that themselves are often incorrect, and sometimes even based on old design maps instead of as-builts.
The report summarizes these outdated methods of utility mapping compared to modern techniques as follows: “Finalizing designs with nonstandardized, unreliable utility data and addressing utility issues with belated, reactive measures during construction is more disruptive and costly, and less efficient than leveraging proactive, predictive, and sophisticated analytical and problem-solving strategies developed by professionals with reliably qualified utility data during design development.”
As part of the report, the Iowa DOT performed a SWOT analysis of the current workflows around utility management, trying to find the best path forward to modernize this process. There were, unsurprisingly, many recommendations and potential paths forward, but one of the major takeaways was the need to lean on existing standards. This is particularly important as projects zoom out to create consistency across different regions, not just limiting to one state.
Both Meis and Colby work on standards with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), with Meis serving as the chair of ASCE 75. This standard deals with the recording and exchanging of data around attributes like location, size, orientation, function, and ownership of newly installed, relocated, or exposed utility infrastructure. This standard, along with ASCE 38 which provides guidelines for investigating and documenting existing utilities, has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium as well, and plays a major role in the ultimate goal, which is to develop a 3D digital twin of these subsurface assets.
“The end result with a 75 standard is to collect enough information and enough metadata about the underground utilities where we can create a 3D digital twin,” Colby said. “If something is ASCE 75 compliant, then we’ll know that we checked all of these boxes for all of these data fields so that in a rendering engine we can render it at a certain accuracy level and be able to show a true 3D representation of the underground.”
In collecting this data, there are, of course, a lot of new or improved technologies that are being leveraged to collect this data. That includes lidar, much of it being used for the subsurface with downhole lidar, as well as mobile mapping data for some assets above the ground. The biggest change in recent years in terms of data collection in the field, though, has been with ground-penetrating radar, or GPR. For years, this data had to be collected with units similar to lawn mowers that had to be pushed along a road, something that both took a long time and could be dangerous with workers on the roads. Today, GPR is capable of working at road speeds, completely changing the data collection process and opening up accessibility.
“This used to take weeks and weeks to collect data, and it was basically prohibitive unless the Department of Energy was paying for it,” Meis told Geo Week News. “So even though the technology has been around, it wasn’t really useful.”
One of the biggest takeaways from the conversation, as well as a major piece of the aforementioned Iowa DOT report, was the need for a “federated GIS” to form the backbone of this data collection and management. Right now, data for these subsurface utilities is siloed across a number of different systems for each individual utility asset owner. So, when a project needs information about everything under the ground for a given area, they need to go out to these different entities and try to piece everything together.
Colby is among those who advocate for a federated GIS in which all of these entities share their data with one common system. Part of this ties back to the standards, which are crucial to making sure everyone is sending in data in the same formats to make it easy for everyone to share. Companies would also be able to set limitations on who can see shared data to ensure data security. To give a sense of how this would work in practice, Colby compared this federated GIS idea to something most of us use every day.
“Think about a weather app,” he said. “You don’t download all of the data from it; you’re seeing it through web services. You’re getting stuff from different agencies, and from a third-party, and it’s being presented to you in a completed view.”
Ultimately, the main takeaway is that the subsurface utilities sector is in a crucial period. Agencies around the U.S. are putting more importance on this work and seeing the risks that are introduced when data is not properly captured and logged. New technology like improved GPR, lidar, and AI to bring all of this data together into one deliverable is changing the game, but the most important thing to change has to be attitudes, and Meis and Colby are hoping to help lead the charge for this shift.
“Usually on a project, they’ll point to the junior-level engineer and say, You get to do the utility,” Meis said. “Really, that person should be the one who has the most experience, because it’s a conundrum. You need the ability to leverage that information. At ASCE we are working on a certification program for a “Project Utility Engineer” to highlight an individual’s competence in this very unique and specialized branch of civil engineering.”
