Streamlining the design and operation of infrastructure in Wales
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Streamlining the design and operation of infrastructure in Wales is both an imperative issue and a challenging undertaking, particularly when responding to the climate crisis and budgetary constraints in the Welsh context. The cost of digitisation and varying levels of digital knowledge amongst professionals often impede efforts to streamline processes. ‘Going digital’ with purchases of data, systems and training can be a hurdle for many infrastructure projects, particularly for smaller ones where digitalisation capex can be prohibitively high. See a Welsh example from AtkinsRéalis that provides a workable and highly successful demonstrator of how projects can benefit from a shared GIS model, providing rapid collaboration against a design deadline of climate change.
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Streamlining the design and operation of infrastructure in Wales
- 1. AtkinsRéalis Public STREAMLINING INFRASTRUCTURE DESIGN AND OPERATION IN WALES Sophie Wood November 2023
- 2. AtkinsRéalis Sophie Wood – AtkinsRéalis
- 3. AtkinsRéalis Public Applied Technology at AtkinsRéalis 3 Helping your people thrive in an operating model fit for the digital age Unlocking the value of your data so your people can make better decisions Integrating and delivering high quality technology your people embrace
- 4. AtkinsRéalis Current Infrastructure Imperatives 01 REDUCE BUDGETS 03 DELIVER HOLISTICALLY 02 REDUCE TIMEFRAMES 04 HAND OVER THE BATON Private & confidential 4
- 5. AtkinsRéalis Rewards from Collaborative Digitalisation 01 REDUCTION IN OVERHEADS 03 SEAMLESS COLLABORATION 02 REDUCE REWORK 04 A PROJECT MEMORY Private & confidential 5
- 7. AtkinsRéalis Private & confidential 7 Driven by Changing Climate Requiring Rapid Response Must be Cost Effective Undertaken by a Diverse Team
- 8. AtkinsRéalis Private & confidential 8 The Elevator Pitch
- 9. AtkinsRéalis Public Spatial Common Data Environment (sCDE) sCDE Site Hub Project Hub 2D Project Web Map Data Catalog 3D Project Web Map Dashboard
- 12. AtkinsRéalis Business Benefits £40k per year £40k per year £40k per year £40k per year £40k per year £160K PER TOOL PER YEAR Time saved on average per tool created £300K COST AVOIDANCE ON PROJECTS PER YEAR Time saved looking for data and printing interim maps/pdfs • Access a single shared source of truth database • View and interrogate project data in an intuitive webapp • Access for all – webapp for viewers and GIS software access to analyse • Ability to export own report maps without bottle neck • Greater overall project visibility
Editor's Notes
- A little bit about me, Studied at University of Chester – Geography and Natural Hazards Management for my undergrad University of Portsmouth – for GIS masters Started my career in Dubai in 2015 as a master planner and GIS junior, moved in 2020 just before COVID hit to Atkins, now AtkinsRéalis. I am a GIS Consultant, I’ve worked on SPA, the east Anglian strategic pipeline alliance, Newgale which I will discuss here, and now NEOM’s Oxagon as GIS PM, hence the juggling plates. My day to day consists of coordination between different disciplines, finding out what new work there is, training my group in the latest programs, and trying to make things go as seamless as possible, all while uploading, processing and displaying data.
- 1. With delivery and maintenance budgets squeezed in the UK and Wales, cost-effective design and operations planning is critical. 2. Time is money! Bulky timescales can result in inflated costs, re-prioritisation during delivery and therefore rework, or outcomes mismatched to intensions. 3. Providing for socioeconomic uplift, biodiversity, customer journey time improvement, climate change mitigation, accessibility, and joined up solutions is all part of modern planning. 4. Design phases move to construction, move to operation; delivering a consistent flow of information preserves value from early in supply chain through to delivery.
- 1. Centralised data management reduces the need for individual teams to have management silos, prompting constant searching for data. Instant visualisation of data should also reduce # of interim figures required. 2. With better availability of data via a single source of truth database, project teams are all ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ ensuring designs for schemes and for environmental mitigation are responding to the same imperatives. 3. With a single data source, multiple visualisations can be produced, each interpreting the data for a new audience. Ecologists can understand exactly what Geotech, Civil Engineers, and other specialists are seeing, and instantly talk them through. 4. Full versioning and audit are integrated, offering a constantly updated archive of data suitable for handover to future stages of design, construction, or operation.
- Today we are going to discuss the Newgale Project and how the use of our new program is being used and I will highlight the benefits. Newgale is one coastal location in Wales where critical infrastructure is affected by coastal erosion. The A487 coastal road has always been affected by coastal storms and a changing coast. Some places are low lying and have a history of flooding. The pebble and shingle bank gives some protection to the coastal road and the village from extreme weather events. Heavy rainfall and storms can flood the areas around Brandy Brook river inland. Storms and waves push the pebbles onto the road and cause it to flood, making it difficult and dangerous to use. The pebble bank would gradually move inland over time were it not for maintenance being carried out keep the road clear. Climate change will lead to rising sea levels, more stormy weather and more frequent periods of heavy rainfall. Over 100 years, sea levels are predicted to rise by up to 1.35m. The beach in front of the pebble bank will become steeper and narrower, making the pebble bank more unstable. More storms and higher tides will push the pebbles onto the A487 more and more often. We can take action to try to stop, slow down, or adapt to these changes, but trying to keep the shingle ridge in its current location will become more difficult in the future as it will happen more often. The actions needed to keep the coastal road usable by trying to stop the pebbles moving would become larger, more disruptive and more costly over time. Trying to protect properties from flooding could mean building flood protection around individual properties, changing their outlook and usability and the character of Newgale.
- This project has been driven by changing climate It requires a rapid response It must be cost effective And undertaken by a diverse team This is where our Spatial CDE comes in to it.
- The Spatial Common Data Environment (sCDE) enables large volumes of diverse spatial data to be ingested, maintained, and communicated to multidisciplinary large teams by creating a secure single-source-of-truth database. Non-technical specialists can use secure in-browser interactive apps to view and analyse 2D, 3D, and dashboard data. Intensive offline analysis processes can access the same single-source-of-truth database to perform complex processes such as hydrological modelling. This democratised data access allows projects to rapidly progress by preventing data sourcing bottlenecks, duplication of data management effort, or rework through siloed data accessibility. Project outputs can be achieved and communicated more quickly, at lower risk and with higher quality results.
- *Woodcote available to all as an example
- This is newgale webmap Through this video I will be showing you the different tools, different widgets, drawing tools, basemaps and attribute tables. You are able to turn on and off layers, depending on the heaviness of the layers depends on how long it takes to load, Below you will spot the image with 3 icons and lines, this pops up the legend so you can see the symbology clearly for layers turned on. The 4-box icon navigates us to the basemaps, here you will see we have a variety of options depending on what you want see. If there is something you see on the map you wish to know more about, you can simply click on the object, and a pop up will appear which shows you all of the different attributes which have been processed for the upload. Here we are going to select a different layer, turn everything on, click on the three dots and select the attribute table. Once this opens you will see immediately that all layers that are turned on, produce different tabs for their relevant attribute tables. If you click on a feature in the attribute table, it will zoom to the feature you’ve selected. As one of our widgets, we have a filter option, here you can pick different fields if it’s in the attribute table, make a formula looking for exactly what you want. As a little addition, for reference to scale, a scale bar has been added here for ease of understanding the size of what you’re seeing. By reclicking on the attribute table, it will close out all attribute tables you saw at the bottom. Just zoom out a little and let’s click on the measure tool. Here you will see we can measure area, distance and location, all of these can be measured under a unit you select as you can see. We have additional insights here, one is draw, where you can select how you wish, and what colours, just simply click and you can create the shape. You can change the transparency, outline width etc. If the view you have is something you wish to save, another additional insight is a bookmark. We have the option where you can add data, and this can be based on the data according to data stored on portal, which is where our spatial cde reads our data. Further on the 3 bottoms, you can see the different options we have, visibility range, pop ups and metadata. I’ll click on this metadata ready for the next video. Below you can see the print function, this option produces a very simplified esri template for a pdf showing everything that has been turned off. For when people require a very simple figure with no major title blocks and different drawing order, this helps take a load of work pressure off. A nice perk that has been added in, if you refresh the webmap, a pop up appears, it asks if you wish to view the old view you had selected, it will turn back on the layers you turned on in the last session and anything else setup with added data or drawings.
- With all of this we’ve been able to prove some of the benefits already, thanks to the history of work in the UK. Our old-gen sCDE has proven cost benefits in many ways, but two of the most striking are these: Firstly, on a major roads project, we achieved savings of around £300k per year thanks to teams being able to directly access the data. Even just through a view window. By doing so, it removed the bottleneck of a GIS analyst creating individual pdf maps for them for small queries or meetings. Instead they could just log on to their browser and see the information for themselves. Secondly, the sCDE lends itself well to creating custom tools – for a major rail project at construction phase, legal compliance is required for new areas of the site as they move into construction, no matter how small. This Environmental Risk Assessment requires a qualified professional to go out to site, quantify risk across a range of ecological elements, prepare mitigation, and communicate this back to Design staff. This can take 2 weeks due to the complexities of the assessments required, and during that time, work on site is halted. Very expensively. Instead, we built a custom application within the sCDE which allowed the Environmental Professional to draw out the new area of site, automatically scan for ecological constraints, and design an exact programme of mitigation, removing irrelevant checks. Over a quarter, this benefitted the project to around £40k in saved time just by the environmental professionals – let alone the financial benefit achieved by having a smoother work programme with shorter halts to work.