PDEng position: Smart Utility Registration

Are you passionate about urban infrastructure and poised to bring Utility Registration processes to their next level? This assignment combines office and field experience and will bring technology and organization process enhancement together and maybe the next challenge for you!

Utility service networks are the lifelines for contemporary cities. Their maintenance and construction are challenging tasks, as busy underground is densely populated with cables, pipelines, and other infrastructures, making construction work a spatial puzzle. As-built network registration is therefore of great importance and considered as a key task by the utility sector.

Registration of deployed cables and pipes is executed often under high time pressure. Safety regulations prescribe that contractors backfill excavated trenches quickly after finishing utility line deployment. This thus means that land surveyors often need to traverse across multiple construction sites at the end of a construction workday and register all constructed networks in a short time-window. In addition, survey outcomes also need to be processed, simplified, and tailored by a specialist at the office. This specialist needs to convert the data into information that complies with one of the many (geographic) information standards applicable and exchangeable between Dutch utility owners.

Since the volume of work at utility contractors increases while the capacity to survey registered pipelines declines, a capacity, efficiency, and data reliability, and safety problem arises for all construction work in the future. The utility sector calls for a solution, wants to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and avoid excavation damages. Siers Infraconsult are also facing the above-mentioned problems, therefore, aims to investigate whether this utility registration process can be streamlined.

This culminates in the following goal of this PDEng, which is to:

Reduce the reliance on land surveyor’s capacity by developing a technology-based process workflow that measures, registers and visualises utility data in a trench in simpler and more automated ways.

We wonder: Can we use combinations of modern solutions – such as LiDAR, terrestrial laser scanners, camera’s or handheld GPS, GNSS technology – to speed up, simplify, or automate the onsite utility data collection? If so, what are current process bottlenecks that first need to be resolved? Should such technology be adopted by the organization?

This PDEng project includes not only an exploration of the applicability of technological solutions but also the assessment and (re-)designing of existing organizational processes within Siers Infraconsult. This assignment will thus be one of a kind since it allows you to trial and gain hands-on experimentation with the various high-end surveying and scanning technologies that are owned by Siers, but also you will learn how this impacts the engineering office processes as well.