WET News

ONSITE UNDERGROUND NETWORKS 10 WET NEWS FEBRUARY 2019 | wwtonline.co.uk utilities held, combined them into an integrated map and made that accessible." In December, the project pro- gressed to the 'sandbox' stage, which saw the creation of a pro- totype map covering an area of Sunderland that extends across approximately 140,000 properties. Ordnance Survey provided the 'base' of the map, including address and street information, while Northumbrian Water, Northern Gas Networks, North- ern Powergrid, Openreach, Newcastle City Council, Sunder- land City Council and Durham County Council supplied infor- mation such as the location of pipework and cables as well as Sites of Special Scientific Inter- est and polluted areas. The asset owners and their contractors have been experi- menting with the prototype to establish any areas for crews, planners, IT staff and lawyers, who worked to create a data-sharing agreement, explore business case development and value generation, and examine how the project could be imple- mented technically. Over the course of the five days, the team came up with a blueprint for a digital mapping system that could provide a detailed, accurate picture of the subsurface space, related to above-ground reference points. "We had a 'mapathon' – a map-themed hackathon – where we brought about 50 or 60 people together to create this integrated underground map of the North-East of England," Carsten Roensdorf, spatial data infrastructure and digital plat- form lead at Ordnance Survey, tells WET News. "We basically used the asset records that the different NEED TO KNOW • An estimated 1.5 million road excavations take place in England each year • There are more than 1.5 million kilometres of underground services and an estimated 4 million kilometres or more of data lines • The Government has estimated that the disruption caused by streetworks and roadworks in England alone costs the economy around £5 billion each year PROJECT ICEBERG Prior to the digital mapping project with Northumbrian Water, Ordnance Survey had begun working alongside Future Cities Catapult and British Geological Survey on 'Project Iceberg'. The first stage of Project Iceberg was to address the "serious issue of the lack of information about the ground beneath our cities and the uncoordinated way in which the subsurface space is managed". Its long-term goal is to help increase the viability of land for development and de-risk future investment through better management of subsurface data. Last year, the Project Iceberg team announced that it was working on a data exchange framework for the subsurface that can be integrated with existing city data systems, looking to create a consistent framework into which data is supplied, assured, stored, accessed and analysed by a multitude of users, while appropriately safeguarding privacy and security. THE VERDICT "Knowing what is underground before we start digging will really help to protect the safety of our workforce, and hopefully reduce the disruption and frustration we cause to our customers through roadworks. If the project works successfully in our operating region, we are keen to develop this as a national platform" Clive Surman-Wells, Northumbrian Water Group improvement, and the next step will be developing the interface to make the data-sharing pro- cess more automated. "That would really support scaling up the solution to a larger number of utilities and data sharers," Roensdorf says. "The current extent of the work is that we want to concentrate on the North-East of England given that we have a number of really committed utilities involved there. Once we can demonstrate tangible benefits to really validate the business case we've created, I think there's potential for much, much wider rollout." At the launch of the sandbox phase, Northumbrian Water's Surman-Wells suggested the map could be "a real game- changer for a number of differ- ent industries", and Roensdorf is hopeful it will inspire sub- stantial improvements. "From a business case devel- opment side, we really looked at the efficiencies and what it means for individual utilities," Roensdorf says. "Utilities have a legal obliga- tion to make information on their assets available, but that process of collating information packs that then go out to the field engineers is quite cumber- some – it takes quite a lot of effort and time within the utili- ties. The result they get is indi- vidual maps that are not inte- grated and are based on a variety of different specifica- tions, and they look very differ- ent depending on which organi- sation they come from. "Northumbrian Water in par- ticular estimates significant efficiency savings by having this much, much slicker way of assembling and collating the information. While at the moment you might have a small team of people having to gather all this information together, with this system you can get it at your fingertips within a few seconds." Ordnance Survey staff at the 2018 Innovation Festival in Newcastle Ordnance Survey's Carsten Roensdorf speaking at the 2018 Innovation Festival

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