Visualising Integrated Information on Buried Assets to Reduce Streetworks

Inaccuracies in existing information, and the lack of ability to integrate, share, reuse and effectively communicate knowledge held by owners of underground assets means that more excavations are required to locate them causing unnecessary traffic congestion and increased costs for the UK economy; unnecessary damage to underground assets results in increased costs, injury and or possible death of workers and loss of service to consumers, both business and domestic. We will research techniques to enhance and integrate existing legacy knowledge sources, together with dynamically acquired accurately geo-referenced data in the street and develop novel techniques to display the resulting knowledge to digging teams and network planners appropriately. Evaluation in two field trials will pave the way for later sector wide adoption, thus benefitting the country, industry (the utilities), the public sector (e.g. highways) and the citizen.

The project was a joint initiative to improve the ability of underground asset location, management and visualisation. The overall value of the project was 151,000 UK pounds.

The project was funded by the Department of Trade and Industry.