Digitization of management instructions

Background

Dug off underground utilities is a global concern for society, which affects access to electricity, clean water, sewage water, gas, and communications. As an example, it costs 400 MSEK in Sweden and £2,4B in the UK every year. Furthermore, dug off power cables can be lethal for construction workers.

Problem description

Today the risk for dug off underground utilities are handled through utility locating, which is done by physically spray painting the ground. This is slow and costly work for the utility network operators (often municipal energy, water and sewage or telecom providers), who finance the utility locating work to protect their infrastructure. The bigger utility network operators have their own administrators to handle the utility locating requests and field technicians who perform the utility locating, while smaller actors procure these services from specialized consultancy firms. Both setups results in substantial costs for the often public utility network operators.

Today, the utility locating process takes between five and ten, sometimes up to 30 days from initial request. The long lead time is due to the many necessary process steps, but also to utility network operators’ challenge to staff, due to a widely varying flow of requests. As a result, construction projects are either delayed or digging is done without utility locating stakeouts, with the obvious risk for damaging cables or pipes. According to the trade association Grävallvar, half of all the damages on underground utilities occur when utility locating has not been done. The long lead times is an extra challenge to road maintenance companies, who often carry out unplanned digging along roads that stretches hundreds of kilometers. Today’s utility locating process simply cannot handle the vast areas or the short time frames.

The physical utility locating process also results in pollution from travels by car, when field technicians need to travel to construction sites to physically stake out the utilities. Moreover, stakeouts can be damaged due to bad weather or by digging. The manual process furthermore introduces additional sources of error, when field technicians need to interpret instruments and maps and then place stakeouts with high precision. Also, before the start of a production project, contractors let their own field technicians measure and digitally document any physical stakeouts, which is a costly and slow method of re-digitizing the utility network location data (utility data).

Another problem with today’s utility locating process is that utility data are often distributed in unsecure email attachments, with the risk of exposing the exact location of critical infrastructure to adversaries.

The idea

By digitalizing the distribution of underground utility data all the above problems can be solved, both in Sweden and globally. The idea of this project is to convert and distribute utility data directly to modern excavators’ computers (i.e. machine control systems). Our solution is to create a platform to seamlessly distribute the correct utility data to the correct excavator at the correct time, thereby completely replacing today’s physical utility locating process. None of the participants in the coming pilot study is aware of any other solution than physical utility location.

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to perform a feasibility study to gather knowledge about the solution in a user, business, legal and technical perspective, as a basis for a following pilot study together with Kungsbacka kommun, VTI, Svevia, Trimble, BM System and other municipal utility network owners.

Expected results

The pre study is expected to provide the following results:

Business

• A comprehensive basis for all parts to decide whether to initiate a pilot study ondigitalizing the utility locating process or not
• Besides Kungsbacka, which have allready agreed, another four municipal utility network operators have agreed to participate in the following pilot study

Technological

• Creation of a test bed for testing and evaluation of the technological concepts necessary to fulfill stakeholders' requirements and wishes on the proposed solution
• IT security design developed, based on legal demands, customer requirements and best practice