Instant reading of infrastructure

What are your respective day-to-day responsibilities?

SR: My role as a civil engineer, like that of my team, is to collect, organise, manage and update data related to municipal infrastructure and land use planning. This data describes the infrastructure that makes up, for example, road networks, such as pedestrian crossings and street lighting, but also invisible infrastructure such as underground networks: drinking water, sewage, electricity, gas, communal antennas, district heating, reserve ducts, etc.

GR: For my part, I am in charge of creating the data. As a geographer specialising in remote sensing, I work either directly in the field using technical tools or via aerial images (drones, aeroplanes, satellites) to collect the information mentioned by Sascha, among other things.

Why is this data so important to your clients?

SR: For our clients – I’m thinking of local authorities, the Housing Fund and major private players such as ArcelorMittal – the precise location of the infrastructure they are responsible for is essential. The first step is to identify it. Then, if they want to work on this infrastructure to maintain or modify it, or simply to build new facilities, they need to know exactly where it is located. It is also important to note that information such as the price of water within a local authority is determined by the quality of the network, i.e. all the technical data describing it (condition, composition and length of pipes, etc.).

GR: Having a constantly updated map of this data also makes it possible to effectively monitor construction projects in progress, ensure they are carried out correctly and that they comply with regulations. This is known as “as-built” monitoring.

What difficulties do municipalities generally encounter in this regard?

SR: Managing a territory is a colossal task that requires considerable resources to be carried out properly. Indeed, the infrastructure for which a local authority is responsible is very extensive and represents a complex technical diagram that is difficult to understand. Added to this is private infrastructure, which does not belong to the local authority, but which it must be aware of in order to better distinguish it when planning the territory. In practical terms, if you damage underground infrastructure belonging to a private internet operator when digging up the road to connect a water supply, for example, this can cause real problems. To avoid this and other pitfalls, you need to have a clear overview of the infrastructure network.

GR: One of the major difficulties is keeping this data up to date, as these networks are constantly evolving. Any intervention in the territory changes its morphology. For municipal technicians, it is therefore sometimes difficult to have a clear picture of what is underground and to provide a description that is both accurate and comprehensive for project owners.

SR: I would add that, depending on changing needs and legislation – I am thinking in particular of the Climate, Nature and Housing Pacts – local authorities must constantly have access to new information in order to comply with regulatory requirements.

Precisely, what expertise do you bring to bear in this area?

SR: We started this activity more than 20 years ago for a small local authority that did not have, and still does not have, a technician specialising in infrastructure and construction management. The local authority secretary was responsible for this. So we provided him with simple, comprehensive and accurate software to access the information he needed on a daily basis. This system is our SIGcom tool, which is now used by more than 60 municipalities and has evolved over time. It is now available on various devices, including mobile phones for practical use in the field, and features dashboards, 3D models, etc.

GR: SIGcom is an application that does not require you to be a surveyor or an engineering doctor to use. It allows you to access a specific plot of land or street with great precision and obtain optimal visibility of the infrastructure in place. The data is organised for pragmatic and efficient reading. SIGcom is suitable for all municipalities, regardless of their size and the human or financial resources they have available for infrastructure maintenance. Sanitation unions have also been using it specifically since 2012.

Today, you are going even further with “Instant As-Built”.
Can you tell us about this solution?

SR: Our customers are always concerned with the accuracy and updating of data. How can we ensure that data is always accurate and constantly up to date? This issue is particularly relevant on very dynamic construction sites, where work evolves on a daily basis, in an environment that can sometimes be complex, such as a congested urban centre, for example. Flying a drone every day or calling in a surveyor to measure a 20-metre trench is not a viable solution. It was this need that gave rise to the “Instant As-Built” solution.

GR: Our goal was to enable anyone on the construction site to map changes made at any time. In addition, the application had to be usable by anyone, after a ten-minute introduction, no more, with a smartphone. With “Instant As-Built”, all you have to do is open the application, select the project and make a video at the location where you want to obtain data. The data is then sent to our cloud, and the complex processing is handled here, in-house, within an hour of receipt. The data is finally available in 3D and our client can generate an up-to-date and complete as-built plan.

SR: Using Instant As-Built, we have already mapped kilometres of drinking water pipes for the municipalities of Junglinster and Helperknapp, for example.

How did you design this tool?

GR: The strength of a group like LSC is its ability to initiate this type of project internally and develop an advanced prototype using the resources and skills at our disposal. We developed the entire design for “Instant As-Built” in this way. However, we also know how to call on a partner to produce very specific hardware components. That’s why we work with a GPS antenna supplier who provides us with a product that is both very easy to use and extremely accurate.

SR: “Instant As-Built” is truly the result of interdisciplinary work and the expertise of several departments at LSC: Luxsense developers for the application, surveyors for accuracy, the SIGcom team for data, site monitoring teams for practical testing, and so on. At every stage of the design process, everyone was able to contribute their expertise to ensure that the product perfectly matched the needs and technical requirements.