There are a few specific areas, it seems, that come to mind when people think about the most common uses of GIS technologies. For those within the industry, even knowing that virtually every sector has some kind of use for the technology, sectors like local government, environmental monitoring, and emergency response may be the immediate associations. People outside the industry, if they are aware of the GIS in the first place, likely associate it with healthcare, given the critical role these maps played in the immediate response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Where GIS has also always played a big role, though, and where knowledge of the technology is becoming more important for a growing number of stakeholders, is in the AEC sector. This was a topic of conversation throughout my week at the Esri User Conference earlier this month, particularly concerning major infrastructure projects. That includes a lunch the company put on for members of the media, for which I was seated at a table with an AEC theme, where we discussed the industry’s growing embrace – reluctant and otherwise – of geospatial tools. Monday’s plenaries also included presentations from customers working with major infrastructure, and Geo Week News was able to interview Raj Ubhi, a representative from Arup, about how they are using GIS in consulting projects with clients in the infrastructure space.
“GIS is definitely something that needs a bit of an explanation,” Ubhi said when asked about how much, if at all, his firm has to provide explanations of the technology. “We will have open houses, and a lot of the time, we have a lot of maps to highlight how construction is progressing. It’s really on us to show them what we’re doing and how geospatial technology can help them in understanding how information comes together, and how it can influence and promote collaboration.”
One of the interesting pieces of this theme around GIS in infrastructure throughout the conference is that the uses varied even within this specific area. For example, in the second plenary on the event’s opening day, which included customer presentations from a number of industries, representatives from the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) spoke about how GIS forms a crucial base for the digital twin they use to monitor and manage their massive facility. Airports, of course, have a lot of moving pieces that are constantly shifting throughout the day, between planes coming in and out, passengers arriving and leaving, bags being shuttled around, and more. All of this needs to be managed efficiently to keep everything on schedule and get people where they need to go.
To help manage this, SFO is leveraging a digital twin, similar to how Dallas-Fort Worth’s airport operates, which they detailed in a keynote presentation at this year’s Geo Week. Given all of the different elements involved with the operations of the airport, GIS makes for the perfect technology to manage all of these different data points.
“We are a small city that never sleeps within our GIS,” their representatives said during the plenary presentation. “We have over 700,000 features, with details as rich as paint markings. We support every single aspect of our operations.”
They explained that their process of utilizing GIS started fairly simply, just as a way to map all of the underground infrastructure involved with the facility. Over time, more data was added into the system, with the real leap coming when GIS was integrated with BIM. This kind of integration is the biggest example of the growing intersection of AEC and geospatial, and it’s been a crucial process with both sides learning how the other operates. For SFO, it unlocked previously unseen value and has allowed them to operate as they do today.
“Our GIS program reality took off when we integrated BIM through our virtual design construction process,” they told the large plenary crowd. “By integrating BIM into GIS, we’re now able to see and open multiple BIM models in one single view.”
As noted above, Ubhi also talked about how Arup is leveraging GIS in their work with a variety of clients, including those in the infrastructure space. Specifically, he spoke about a project they are working on with Metrolinx, a transportation agency of the Ontario government. They are working on a number of projects improving their rail infrastructure, including a new extension in the Toronto area, the Eglinton Crosstown West Extension (ECWE).
For this project, Ubhi explains, GIS is crucial for a number of different reasons. One of those is to visualize and provide context to relevant stakeholders and the public, as explained above. This is not just a visualization engine for Arup, though. It’s a crucial coordination system that allows data to come in from different sources into one place.
“From a GIS perspective, what we’re doing is supporting various disciplines,” Ubhi told Geo Week News. “All of the technical disciplines bring their data together, and we visualize that on a map so that we can better understand what the built environment is now, and when once we implement this new light rail transit system, what the built environment is going to be in the future.”
Without having a GIS at the center of all of this work, it would be very easy for work and data from different teams to be placed in different areas, leading to confusion, cost overruns, and project delays. Now, things like designs and as-is survey data can live in one place, with geographic context, to support what is a complex and significant project.
The center of what Geo Week is today, and what was the heart of its inception, is the ever-growing connection between the geospatial and AEC industries. For these two sectors, GIS and BIM, respectively, represent arguably their most powerful solutions. It was clear at this year’s Esri User Conference that this merging is only picking up steam, and there were countless examples of how large infrastructure projects, both for operations and construction, are leaning on GIS to provide critical context and form the basis for organizations’ strategies and sources of truth.
