Cyber Civil Infrastructure and Digital Underground

At the upcoming CREATE PI Seminar, Prof Ian Smith, principal investigator of Cyber Civil Infrastructure project at the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) and Rob Van Son, project leader of Digital Underground, a collaborative project between the Singapore Land Authority and FCL, will be presenting their respective work.

Data & Infrastructure: Cyber Civil Infrastructure

The architecture, engineering and construction industry incurs an annual global expenditure of more than $10 trillion. Accounting for a 40% share of this cost, civil infrastructure is an essential investment that needs to be managed efficiently. To improve asset management, measurement data has to be interpreted for the quantification of reserve capacity and more informed execution of interventions.

Many recent proposals that include uncertainty for data interpretation are not appropriate for the context of large civil-engineering infrastructure. Furthermore, statistical formulations that are currently popular in academic circles are often inadequately applied and incomprehensible to practicing engineers.

Prof Ian Smith will present error domain model falsification (EDMF), a multiple-model methodology that has been specially developed for civil-infrastructure asset management. Several recent full-scale case studies will then be described briefly. EDMF is a useful tool for asset managers who are concerned with sustainability. It also has potential over the next decade to be a kernel methodology when scaling-up the Internet of Things to the Internet of Systems for responsive cities of the future.

Speaker’s Profile

Ian F.C. Smith is Professor of Structural Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He received his PhD from Cambridge University, UK in 1982. His research interests are on intersections of computer science with structures and urban systems. Applications include advanced cyber-physical systems such as biomimetic structures and sensed civil infrastructure.

In 2003, he co-authored the text book Fundamentals of Computer-Aided Engineering (Wiley) and the 2nd Edition, Engineering Informatics: Fundamentals of Computer-Aided Engineering appeared in June 2013. In 2004, he was elected to the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and in 2005, he received the Computing in Civil Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Over 15 years, he was Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal "Advanced Engineering Informatics”. He is Specialty Editor of the ASCE journal "Computing in Civil Engineering" and currently holds several editorial board memberships.


Digital Underground: A Whole Ecosystem Approach to Mapping Singapore’s Underground Utilities

To optimise the use of limited available land, land-scarce cities such as Singapore are increasingly looking towards the underground in search of more space. A good understanding of what already exists underground is essential for the planning and management of underground space. Utility pipes and cables make up a significant part of what exists underground.

The Digital Underground project is a collaboration between Singapore Land Authority and the Singapore-ETH Centre’s Future Cities Laboratory that aims to develop a roadmap towards a reliable 3D map of underground utilities in Singapore. To establish a feasible workflow from capturing real world utility services upstream to application of a map of underground utilities downstream, the project is investigating state-of-the-art techniques for data capture and recommendations for future implementation of that capacity.

In his presentation, Rob van Son will share the results of the Digital Underground project that has been achieved thus far. This includes an overview of 3D mapping techniques and a data model framework that enables application. He will reflect on the challenges that lie ahead towards establishing a reliable 3D map, and on the ‘whole ecosystem approach’ employed by the project aimed at thoroughly involving government and industry stakeholders at an early stage.

Speaker’s Profile

Rob van Son is the project coordinator of the Digital Underground project which is a collaboration between Singapore Land Authority, Singapore-ETH Centre, and the City of Zürich. He has over 10 years of experience in applied scientific research, public sector consulting and product development. He is experienced in connecting cutting-edge research, technology providers, and end users to develop applications of 3D geoinformation, from conventional maps to serious games using virtual and augmented reality.

Before joining Singapore-ETH Centre, Rob was a technology consultant at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). In this role, he advised national and local government institutions on topics such as neighbourhood resilience and burglary prevention, and operationalised research into engaging new business cases that fostered the prototyping and evaluation of new start-up products. Prior to that, he worked as a researcher at TNO's Modelling, Simulation and Gaming department, developing and optimising the 3D virtual world production pipeline for training simulators and urban planning applications.

Rob holds an MSc degree in Computer Science from the Centre for Geometry, Imaging and Virtual Environments at Utrecht University.