COVID-19 has created awareness around and accelerated the need for mapping of our indoor spaces. While the importance of location information has been paramount and well recognized since the onset of the pandemic, one thing that didn’t get highlighted as it should have been is the indoor location aspect – where exactly is an infected patient inside a building; how many other people are there in that room; how do hospitals retrofit air conditioners, etc.
“As we now reopen our offices, we need to understand where problems exist; how can we distance the employees; what is the capacity for customers. These are the problems that GIS is designed to help solve,” points out George Mastakas, vice president of enterprise solutions at Cityworks, a Trimble company. “COVID-19 has fast-tracked the need to map our indoor spaces by at least two to three years.”
Mastakas agrees that the whole world – the government as well as the technology and infrastructure industry — has been found lacking when it comes to mapping the third dimension.
“It’s ironic that we have these natural disasters, and everytime we repeat the same process. The disasters strike, infrastructure is demolished, lives are lost and disrupted, and we clean it up.” This is largely because so far disasters mostly take place in one location – a city or at best a region, and whatever happens is somewhat in isolation. “But the ‘pan’ in the word pandemic means it’s happening everywhere, and it’s inescapable. COVID-19 has had the unintended consequence of getting us to think differently, more creatively, on how to operate.”
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There is an incredible opportunity here for organizations to jump into this space, especially in the US, with the CARES Act coming in force late March. The $2-trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, is aimed at providing relief to individuals, businesses, and government organizations.
“The Act provides funds for businesses and local governments to acquire technology to basically do these sorts of things — retrofitting, cleaning and tracking all of assets — so that they could create a business operation that is more healthy and conducive to interacting with the public and even their own staff,” he adds.
Going beyond BIM
Construction and infrastructure projects have been using BIM for some time now. But while it is great for engineers and construction managers, not everyone has access to the BIM models. This is where GIS comes in.
“There is an abundance of BIM and CAD out there. But I don’t know if there is enough of 3D in the world of operations. This is where we need to see a proliferation of 3D,” points out Mastakas, while adding that the user community today wants more and more 3D models for better inspection and monitoring.
For instance, again looking at COVID, the hospitals need to quickly figure out how to retrofit ventilation to isolate infected patients. “This is what Esri’s ArcGIS Indoors allows us to do. BIM can certainly give us a view of the facility, but if you are looking to analyze your spatial data and find those intersections, only GIS can discover and solve these problems,” he adds.
3D mapping is just one aspect. A lot of municipalities used the funds to buy technologies like Teams, Zoom and more laptops, because they were so ill equipped to work out of offices. Mastakas says this is where they approached Cityworks to help them continue their operations.
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COVID-19 solutions
Cityworks, which became a Trimble subsidiary after its acquisition last year, is a market leader in GIS-centric public asset management. It was the first solutions provider to receive Esri’s ArcGIS Indoors solution designation earlier this spring, and its mobile native app works seamlessly with ArcGIS Indoors to help organizations manage vertical assets. Recently, it released a new real-time IoT solution that combines Trimble sensor data, ArcGIS location data, and Cityworks operations data in one seamless asset management solution for water and wastewater utilities.
“All our infrastructure – the streets, the water infrastructure, the sewer infrastructure, the electric infrastructure – needs constant management. One aspect of our solution is to provide asset owners the ability to care for their infrastructure and make sure they are well-maintained and operational,” Mastakas explains.
Another side of Cityworks covers the gamut of permits. “We are talking about building permits, code enforcement and a whole host of areas that where you need to track applications that come in. While all that infrastructure is getting created, at various stages organizations need to inspect it and make sure the work was done right.”
Cityworks released a COVID solution back in mid-April. The objective was to provide organizations with a way for them to track, clean and monitor assets. “Our city customers were getting a barrage of inqueries from worried citizens about their health. So we provided a way for the citizen to engage and find the closest testing facility.”
Another important aspect of Cityworks COVID-19 response is tracking and facilitating operations as they relate to federal funding opportunities. By combining their work into projects, Cityworks users can track emergency-related work such as closing public facilities and managing testing and distribution sites, donations, and PPE or other material inventories. The solution also allows users to track deferred work or operational shortfalls due to COVID-19.
As COVID-19 continues to be a challenge for many communities, now they are also preparing for hurricane and wildfire seasons with limited resources. Cityworks is supporting ArcGIS solutions for COVID-19 and emergency management — helping communities take services online, reprioritize fieldwork, streamline FEMA reporting, and inform residents.
For instance, in the City of Topeka in Kansas, several departments are using a Cityworks project to track labor, cost, and materials associated with the ongoing COVID-19 response. The city is also an avid user of GIS data for open data reporting to the public. They are using Survey123 and a map dashboard embedded in their public website to help local businesses self-report their availability and services during the pandemic.
In Florida, the St. Johns County Public Works Department is using Survey123 and ArcGIS Operations Dashboard to help managers monitor employee work availability while also protecting staff health and safety. The solution was so effective for the PWD that the County Administrator requested an expanded version of the solution to support more than 1,300 employees across all departments.
In June, Cityworks incorporated capabilities around business reopening — where businesses would have to apply to reopen and how they would reopen. Citizens could report health code violations. The solution also helps cities and counties track the labor, cost, and materials used to safely reopen public facilities and maintain vigorous cleaning schedules. “Our solutions for emergency management will continue to evolve into a collection of workflows and capabilities to serve the needs of our customers,” Mastakas adds.
Innovations in asset monitoring
Asset monitoring is a critical area for cities to function smoothly and there are some very interesting things happening in this space. For instance, the water infrastructure in the United States is graded ‘D’ by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Over 65-67% of it is more than 50 years old, and at major risk of failure, making it an untenable problem for the asset owners. “How do you get ahead of a problem where you have all of this infrastructure underground? How can you figure out which are the bad areas and where to put your attention? You can’t inspect a water line very easily without digging it up,” Mastakas says.
So Cityworks and Trimble recently introduced an IoT solution that deploys Trimble’s Telog sensors in the network — in fire hydrants, valves, manholes, etc – and uses Trimble Unity to visualize the pressures and levels in flow and even listen for pressure transients (or fluctuations that can cause pipes to burst). Then, alarms and thresholds trigger inspections and work orders in Cityworks ASM for fast and effective response when an issue arises.
“We have combined a real-time view with IoT technology so that water utilities not only see the health of the network today, but can also look at trends and adjustments as required. If we can identify and get ahead of these problems, we can save on repairs, disruptions and damages,” he says.
Cityworks is also working with Esri and Trimble in the three dimensional space. While Trimble’s scanners enable scanning of buildings and infrastructure and sourcing of that information, Esri’s ArcGIS Indoors makes it ready for consumption and asset management operations. “Knowing where your assets are, how they relate to other assets, the system to which they belong are all powerful tools.”
There are also initial endeavours into 3D mixed reality. For instance, a mixed reality model could help identify places where tree growth conflicts with nearby infrastructure. Trees can be a big problem when their branches fall on the electric infrastructure and trip them. “Electric infrastructure runs through people’s personal properties — right through their backyards in some cases – and homeowners are very protective about their trees. But you can show them the projection of the trees’ growth and the damage they can cause,” he says.
Another really exciting application of mixed reality is viewing underground infrastructure in relation to the real world, so field workers can literally see the underground pipes and where they are located and what equipment they might need to help solve the problem that they are looking into.
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