Q&A: Ordnance Survey on creating a National Underground Asset Register

Last month, the government’s Geospatial Committee announced £1 billion of investment to create a coherent national location data framework by 2025, including the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR). Carsten Roensdorf, strategic propositions manager at Ordnance Survey said the NUAR has the potential to change the way utilities work. Utility Week spoke to him about OS’s involvement in developing the project.

The NUAR is intended to improve safety when digging or working underground by showing operatives where cables, pipes and wires are. Asset strikes can endanger lives, cause disruption and cost the economy around £1.2 billion each year according to the committee.

Following trials in the north east and London, the project between Northumbrian Water, Ordnance Survey, Mobileye and 1Spatial to map electricity and phone cables, water and gas pipes was given ministerial backing for nationwide roll-out in June.

How did OS become involved in this?

“Ordnance Survey has been involved in a number of projects involving underground data to support longer term urban planning. In 2018, the opportunity came along to work with Northumbrian at the Innovation Festival. Northumbrian was championing it from a utility perspective so they were clear about what they wanted – to improve business processes, persuade other utilities operating in similar areas to explore, and have a greater amount of collaboration. The event brought together data from different companies where there had never been that level of interaction before.

“The festival was a really good proving ground because we identified people in the relevant departments to look at the difficult problems and say: ‘Let’s try it. We all believe there’s something in it so let’s make it work!’”

What were some of those problems?

“We knew data sharing permissions would be a challenge from the start. The legal framework was considered from the outset along with the technical and the business case, including investment and costs. Legal departments worked with data asset managers and teams protecting data assets to come up with the legal framework for sharing data. This was established before the technical side of the project advanced.

“There were some organisations that were more challenging than others and there was a constant quest to get everyone on board.”

How did the Geospatial Committee become involved?

“The festival explored the legal framework, technical capability and brought out the business value of sharing the data between utilities about the underground. From there it was turned it into a prototype, which brought the Geospatial Commission to the scene. They had identified infrastructure and underground infrastructure as an important target area that government should look at to see what intervention government needed to do that the market hadn’t sorted out.”

Where does the data come from?

“There is not necessarily a need to look underground or carry out excavations. We look at the asset records, but these are not necessarily accurate because of data quality issues in some areas. We have put together the best intelligence from companies about their own respective networks – this is pulled all together and presented as a common map.

“At the moment if you want to dig a hole you have to request the data from operators who work in that area and receive a map typically as a PDF with just one utility on it, but we are combining this on a common map base from OS.

“OS’s role is to organise the community, provide the base map to integrate the feeds from data providers, and to operate the platform as trusted data broker. That is made available through a licencing agreement from the data providers to the end users.”

Operationally, what differences are there between rural and urban areas?

“From a data sharing perspective there is little difference in rural or urban areas, but from an end user perspective the networks are a lot more dense in urban areas, which creates visualisation challenges about how to present the right information and the right amount of information.

“The interface interaction challenge is to present the underground data in a way that does not overwhelm the user but still provides a rich picture of the underground. This can be done on mobile devices such as a phone – which has a limited area to display information.

“Generally, the map only covers just below the surface so would not interfere with transport lines for example. Transport for London (TfL) is a project partner in London. They provided engineering difficulty data that includes exclusion zones and areas that need extra permissions to dig.”

What has the feedback been like so far?

“Field engineers love it! We ran a variety of trials with participating organisations and after working with the system everyone said they could see the benefits and wanted it as a part of standard equipment for excavations.

“If you put yourself in the shoes of an experienced utility engineer; they will have seen new kit rolled out before and we detected there was a reluctance about another technology being proffered as helpful when really the safety is more reliant on experience. That reluctance is healthy because at the end of the day, they need to make the job safe for themselves and that will come from their own experience.”

Will it change health and safety?

“The health and safety guidelines are very appropriate and have been put together over a long time. In the pilot we were clear that we did not want to bypass existing ways of working and regulations. We made it clear that all existing guidelines and processes should be followed. We wanted to make the normal provisions apply and see the tool as additional information.”

 Can users make changes or updates to the maps?

“Information flow is not one directional. We prototyped something we called ‘observations’ where the user can give feedback on the asset data available. They can add notes on a particular asset if there are inaccuracies and the severity. The information is sent to the asset owner for them to decide what to do with the information.

“We had a lot of discussions about whether users could add new assets or change them but everyone felt strongly that the responsibility of the correctness of the assets should be with the asset owner or manager.”

Will users need online access to use the maps?

“We have done comprehensive user testing with utilities, local authorities and contractors in the areas we have run pilots in and the feedback about usability was that some level of offline capability would be highly desired.

“The reality of the existing networks is that we cannot guarantee 4G connectivity anywhere at the moment so it is a known issue that any software system will either not be available or we need offline capability.”

What are the next steps in the project?

“Following the pilots in the north east and London, the Geospatial Commission will carry out further market engagement and procure an operational system. We have the components of a system, which from an Ordnance Survey perspective, we are almost there that we could operationalise it, but it’s down to the Geospatial Committee to organise the timeframe.”

Is there anything utilities can do to further it?

“Participation is important and evangelising about the benefits of the system and of sharing data. It will be difficult to prove over a period of time that the number of utility strikes is going to come down. We need to look at reporting mechanisms associated with strikes, which the Geospatial Commission is doing.

“Utilities should look at their asset records and find ways to continuously improve that. Not necessarily to make a big step change, just adjustments to the day to day procedures that could improve data quality over time.”