Smart Infrastructure Mapping Underground Utilities

Like an old house, our urban infrastructure is shot through with hidden, unmapped conduits, pipework and cabling. But, given the right policies and collaborative working, today’s technologies could enable us to create a real-time, 3D picture of our buried utilities – producing benefits for providers, customers and the general public alike.

Since Victorian times, utility firms and infrastructure providers have been burying pipes and cables beneath our roads – creating intricate, complex networks to distribute services and collect waste water. And over the centuries, almost all these organisations have folded or been sold, merged, nationalised, privatised or restructured, leaving asset records that are often incomplete and outdated.

Consequently, few utility and infrastructure organisations have an accurate, detailed picture of their distribution networks: to locate a particular conduit or junction, they must pull together whatever records they can find, carry out preliminary explorations using magnetic or electronic sensors, then cross their fingers and start digging. And with no universal system for sharing data between all the different utilities firms, they’re just as likely to stumble across another provider’s network as to locate their own.

This paper, provided by KPMG, outlines how utility companies, technology providers and local authorities could collaborate to deliver a more efficient way of maintaining the a city infrastructure.

If you are involved in the following areas, then this report would provide a useful insight into how smart utilities infrastructure can start to work for cities across the world.