Critigen

Next Generation Infrastructure

LBx Journal, September 2010
BUSINESS INTEGRATION SERIES, PART 1 OF 4
By Mike Underwood, SVP of Global Sales, Critigen

Embodied carbon per facility

This is a four-part series on location-based business integration with a focus on supporting the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of physical infrastructure such as transportation, communications networks, and government facilities. This first part will discuss the state of infrastructure and the role of location intelligence in achieving next-gen infrastructure requirements, goals and objectives. Parts 2, 3 and 4 will address next-gen business process integration/business management and decision support tools, the role of the system integrator in balancing technology and business objectives, especially relative to location data, and the role of managed/outsourced services in leading this change in doing and managing business.

Infrastructure 2.0
In mature economies, a great deal of current infrastructure is either deteriorating (bridges, water treatment facilities, roads, etc.) or is extremely inefficient from an energy consumption or carbon impact perspective (facilities, supply chains, capital development, etc.). In some cases, infrastructure was built to last decades; in other cases it was built as quickly and cheaply as possible with cheap labor and shoddy materials. Have you ever wondered what the consequences of the lowest bidder could be? There is no need to look much further than the Big Dig tunnel collapse in Boston last year, or the massive destruction in Haiti and Chile due to recent earthquakes. In developing countries, communities continue to struggle with providing basic needs—water, electricity, communications. Think of this state as Infrastructure 1.0.

Investments in infrastructure matter. First and foremost, it is a public safety and economic growth and security issue—roads, bridges, waterways, seaports, airports, railroads are essential to the transportation of goods and services across borders; communications networks, whether telecom, cable, wireless, or satellite, are critical to the distribution of information and the global financial system. Utilities—gas and electricity—are critical to powering businesses, factories, and homes. Energy pipelines—oil and gas—are the lifeblood of the modern world. Water infrastructure has been a national and economic security issue for countries since the beginning of civilization.

What is new today is sensor, 3D design, and location technology that enable infrastructure developers, providers, and consumers to address increasing economic, social, political, and environmental demands associated with infrastructure, such as costs, sustainability, security, monitoring and compliance.

Nations at all stages of economic maturity recognize the significant social, political, environmental and financial benefits to be gained through development of intelligent infrastructure. Smart pipes, smart windows, smart drainage networks and smart electrical grids are equipped with sensors and information networks that monitor, manage and optimize the performance and operational efficiency of these assets. Smart infrastructure not only provides the basic functionality, but has the ability to adjust to the demands of consumers and also react to and take advantage of the environment. Think of this state and goal as Infrastructure 2.0., or next-gen infrastructure (NGI) – modernizing existing facilities, and designing, building and maintaining new infrastructure that meets the environmental, social, political, and economic demands of the future.

Integrating Location
Next-generation infrastructure development will be driven by location technologies in much the same way that complex product development benefited from the advent of Computer-Aided Design and Product Data Management – allowing concurrent engineering processes to speed up development time and improve quality and performance. Similarly, planners, designers, construction managers, security experts and operators will utilize location intelligence to create an authoritative and historically accurate spatial view of intelligent infrastructure. Every aspect of next-generation infrastructure development, from site selection through operations and maintenance, will be developed concurrently with informed analysis based on location information, ensuring sustainability and security through all elements of the lifecycle.

Spatial information is at the core of successful site and infrastructure development and requires:

• Careful planning,
• Thorough site preparation,
• Intricate design,
• Masterful construction, and
• Competent operations.

Completing these projects through to successful operations involves many complex, interdependent project activities that need to be executed over a multi-year, phased lifecycle. To ensure that these activities are successful, many project processes must be automated and integrated so that the outcome of a single task is linked to other tasks that contribute to or are affected by that task. This requires significant investment in information resource planning and information technology.

To meet the needs of large-scale next-gen infrastructure projects, methods have been devised and technologies combined to provide multi-dimensional spatial information with rich content descriptions that evolve with the ever-changing phases of the project lifecycle. Spatial information is a critical asset for decision support, especially when integrated with the design and business systems used in each phase of the project lifecycle.

Next-gen infrastructure sustainability goals have added yet another dimension to these massive construction projects. Location, time and now energy costs have created what one client called ‘6D’ infrastructure data – location (latitude, longitude, elevation), time (date from the project schedule), and energy cost (measured in megawatt hours). In each project phase, multi-dimensional location information combined with rich content descriptions and linkages to other business data help leaders synthesize massive amounts of project information utilizing an efficient, spatial view. This creates clarity insight that cannot be achieved through traditional text or numeric data.

What NGI Means for You
Developers of NGI look to teams with consulting firms that understand the complexities associated with sustainable lifecycle infrastructure development and that bring an integrated execution (implementation) capability in all phases of development and operations. Keep in mind the lasting value associated with leveraging spatial intelligence in all phases, and the need to incorporate information management into all elements of scope, from site selection through operations and maintenance.

In many ways, consumers are driving the rate of change in development of NGI. Selecting goods and services based on a manufacturer’s or provider’s environmental record or carbon policy is becoming mainstream. Data and personal security are elemental components of all Web services in the consumer sector today. Location intelligence is commonplace in applications that serve a variety of needs. Consumer (this includes businesses and governments) demand for clean, smart and sustainable goods and services, through public and private infrastructure, will dictate accelerated investment in the technologies and integration strategies we’ve discussed in this article. Competitive success for both commercial enterprises and public acceptance of government services depend greatly on these technologies and strategies.

In effect, every citizen on the planet is a stakeholder in the development of clean, efficient and sustainable infrastructure, the development of which is both a global wealth creation engine and arguably a logical approach for future development on the planet.

Next-gen infrastructure presents itself in many ways, and location intelligence (which is connected to sensors and 3D design) is a key tool required across the lifecycle of infrastructure development.

Examples include:

• Alternative Energy Generation Market demand for clean, efficient energy, combined with regulatory pressure and the strategic need for decoupling dependence on carbon-based energy resources is driving energy producers and distributors to leverage high-resolution satellite imagery and geospatial information to conduct site selection and analysis for utility-grade solar and wind generation facilities. Site selection for the development of alternative energy generation facilities involves a number of factors that can be assessed efficiently using high-resolution satellite imagery and other, integrated geo-accurate data such as weather, water, grid, topology, etc.
• Consolidation and Restoration of Facilities Base Relocation and Consolidation (BRAC) within the U.S. Department of Defense is driven in large part by the need to reduce energy consumption (the DOD being the single largest consumer of electrical power in the U.S.). Web-based Master Planning is a key tool supporting this transformation. Utilizing aerial and satellite imagery, geospatial data are combined with automated workflows to create site selection scenarios, including environmental impact analysis, for the design, construction and operations of new and refurbished defense facilities. Web-based Master Planning is a tool now available to all market sectors, including local government and commercial enterprises.
• Economic Development Projects Hosting the Olympics is an enormous undertaking for any city, not only in terms of cost but in terms of sheer project management. The London 2012 Olympic Games is a multi-billion dollar endeavor and an example of a large-scale design, engineering, and construction project that must be managed across the entire 7 year lifecycle of the project. This involves developing a common set of data for the integration of supply chain, design, imagery and GIS data to support the planners, designers, builders and operators involved in all facets of the project. This massive next-gen development effort utilized LEEDS methodology, minimizing the carbon impact of the facilities, buildings and associated infrastructure.
• Urban Planning How does one build the world’s first zero-waste, carbon neutral city? In addition to an extensive team of engineers, it requires the integration of thousands of carbon monitoring sensors on a 3D geospatial model of the entire development then built into a sensor web, which is used to monitor and prove zero-carbon emissions.

Two prominent design drivers for Infrastructure 2.0 are sustainability and security.

Sustainability
Solar mapping technology is a critical catalyst for sustainable Infrastructure 2.0 development because it helps public and private sector organizations to assess, plan and deploy photovoltaic (PV) on an enterprise scale. The City of San Francisco is leading the charge for sustainable infrastructure development. Through cooperative development efforts with public and private consultants (Critigen), the city is paving the way and helping to transform the development of infrastructure throughout the city that incorporates PV (solar) as a principal source of electrical energy generation.

Through the public spatial information portal www.sf.solarmapping.org, residents and commercial operators can assess, design and arrange for installation of solar technologies within their homes or commercial facilities through the solar portal. The ease of assessment has resulted in a dramatic acceleration of solar adoption rates, which leads to more inventory, more installations, and the rapid development of a solar economy. Where tax credits have failed to stimulate the solar market, a simple web-based portal has succeeded.

Security
Security and emergency preparedness will take on new importance as the demand for both physical and information security controls increases at an exponential rate due to geopolitical and economic reasons: terrorism and the globalization of information sharing. Data is the Achilles heel of an information-based economy. Global terrorism, and the associated risk of attacks on Data Centers is therefore a key driver in site selection, design, construction, operation and maintenance of next-generation infrastructure.

As we start down the path to smarter infrastructure, security concerns will extend to protecting data from unintentional exposure or release, as well as prevent and protect unauthorized access to control systems. Specifically, security as it relates to asset availability, information integrity, and retaliation will stretch the current bounds of what is possible and legal and will in many ways define new best practices for NGI.

Questions of authenticity, gold copy, and latest version will be critical as more data become unlocked, synthesized, and transformed into new information products. A sophisticated attack may seek only to change or access underlying data that is exposed in a less secure environment, with the attackers knowing that the resulting analysis will give them their desired results. For example, what would happen if the results of an oil field analysis were tweaked just a bit? Would a promising find actually be ignored? Would great expense be put forth for a dry well?

As cloud computing becomes more in vogue, shared resources become a more and more tempting target. Taking out a major cloud data center would impact not just one company but potentially hundreds or even thousands as the effects ripple across the system. The situation would not be dissimilar to one years ago when a major phone switching center went down. The need for information integrity will continue to grow, not only as more and more data comes on line, but as more and more decisions are made based on the complex processing of visually enriched data.