SDSW23: NUAR - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

tl;dr

Amy Manefield from the Geospatial Commission talks about the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR), discussing its purpose, challenges, and progress. It highlights the complex issues relating to the vast network of underground assets in the UK, the economic impact of accidental strikes, and the data storage challenges.

However, it also outlines NUAR's potential to address these issues by providing an interactive digital map for accessing underground assets, thereby improving safety and delivering economic benefits. The presentation details the efforts to standardize and secure data, engage with stakeholders, and address challenges such as onboarding asset owners and funding.

Overall, while challenges exist, NUAR is making significant progress and aims to revolutionize the management of underground assets in the UK.

Transcript

So today I'll be talking to you about NUAR - The National Underground Asset Register, the good, the bad and the ugly. We've got quite a bit of detail around each of those items. So just a quick introduction to the Geospatial commission, but David, already help me out there. So we are an expert committee within the government responsible for setting the UK's geospatial strategy. This includes also setting policy, coordinating things like the PSGA agreement and investing in major geospatial data projects like NUAR.

So what are some of the ugly problems? I know I said the good, the bad, the ugly. But let's start, let's start at the end.

So what are some of the issues? The really ugly user problems that NUAR is hoping to address? Well, to begin, we have a very complicated network of underground assets. Over 4 million kilometres of pipes and cables that are buried underground. And in order to access these assets, a hole is dug every 7 seconds. This vast sheer volume of excavation works across the UK results in roughly 60,000 accidental strikes. This costs a sheer amount of £2.4 billion per year to the EAC to the UK economy.

Now these problems stem from where the data is stored and how it is stored. It is held by over 650 different organisations across the UK and that is held in 650 different formats, different schemas it's produced in 650 different scales, different symbology. So it's incredibly difficult for the planners and excavators to access this information as well as an incredibly lengthy process. Now these organisations are obliged to share this information on a daily basis hundreds of times a day. And with these excavators needing to access 6 to 10 datasets for each excavation work, this can take on average 6.1 days in order to access all the information for this excavation and as much as up to two weeks. So it's really a complex problem with a lot of stakeholders and a lot of people involved.

But there is good news. So we are well on our way to improving this situation with NUAR. NUAR is an interactive digital map giving near instant access to all the assets underground, to those who need it in order to go home safely at the end of every day. Not only will it improve the safety of workers, but we'll also estimated to deliver £350 million of economic benefits to the UK every year. If you're interested in those numbers, we do have the business case published and you can look into how those were produced. But roughly it's around data efficiencies and sharing that data, the actual cost of those strikes and themselves to the assets, as well as reducing the amount of disruption to businesses and the public.

So that's great. But how are we going to do that? What will we do? Or really, what are we doing about that right now?

So we are standardising data from over 650 different organisations and we've got a team down the front. The 1Spatial team has been keenly doing that for us, which has been great and we're harmonising this into the NUAR harmonised data model. This is the first implementation of the OGC MUDDI model, which is the Open Geospatial Consortium Model for Model for Underground Data Definition and Integration. And we've been feeding our learnings through this implementation back to the OGC so that they can implement it into the standard. We are creating a secure platform on which to share this data with security being baked in from the very beginning. Also key to the outcomes is streamlining that data, sharing with data sharing being shared once to NUAR or on a regular cadence, and then being accessed hundreds to thousands of times so that it can be used for safe excavation. We are also supporting data quality through the implementation of a feedback loop within the platform so that people on the ground can feedback erroneous data that they've been experiencing back to the organisations themselves. And above all, we are making sure that more workers digging those holes are getting home safely every day. Now, in order for us to do this, it really needs to be underpinned by a great service.

So we've met the initial government’s, the CDDO service assessments, and we've got another one upcoming. And this has been a great opportunity for us to really focus on that user experience, because if it's not a great platform, that's easy to use, then these people who are out in every weather, every condition, rain, rain, hail and shine, digging those holes just won't use the service. So it's been really good way of us ensuring that we're seeking feedback from users, implementing that feedback and making sure that the platform is as accessible to all users as possible. We've built a secure platform that asset owners and security stakeholders can really trust and make sure that we're not going to be putting this data into the wrong hands. And we've been testing all of these aspects as well as our core functionality of delivering the safe, safe excavation use case throughout and MVP rollout. We've used this to get more feedback from industry to make sure that we continue to deliver this for industry, but with industry as well. And so far with a score of 8.8 out of ten for users likely to recommend this service to colleagues, it’s so far going pretty well.

Now, we're not the first to think about building such a platform, and there's been a lot of projects, those of you who've been in the industry for some time, some of these will sound familiar to you. So we've really taken learnings from projects like Hades and Project Iceberg, as well as learning from others who are trying to implement similar systems across European, our European neighbours, but also in America, Singapore and Australia. And we’re not just taking on learnings from other projects, but will also seek to sort out to share our learnings about what we've learnt from our project so far. A great example of this is Volt, which is the equivalent of NUAR up in Scotland, and they've been a great stakeholder with us from the beginning where we're really sharing our learning as well as taking learnings from what they've done so far.

Now to do this, we've really had to work with the experts and with 1Spatial, they've been transforming all our data that we've been receiving for the platform, which has been amazing. And we've got, you know, multiple different organisations. Atkins being our primary contractors, sorry Atkinsrealis - a recent name change, as well as Ordnance Survey being part of our supply chain. We've got stakeholders across government, including our security stakeholders, Greater London Authority, the Welsh Government and GEO Place. So we're really trying to access as much knowledge as possible to make sure that we implement this well.

But how is it going? So, you know, we talk about it a lot and so far it's doing really well. We've engaged with over 700 organisations across England, Wales and Northern Ireland and with having a really robust and fit for purpose legal agreement in place we've been able to fully on board 165 asset owners. So we classify fully onboarded as those who have signed our long term data sharing agreement, as well as providing us data. And then there's additional to that, another 176 organisations which are actively participating. So that's either they've signed our data exploration agreement, which is our more short term data agreement and or provided data or the DDA as well. And if you put this all together, we really are on track for rolling out our MVP across England, Wales and Northern Ireland by spring of next year.

Now the bad, the ugly, or you could say challenges because we like to see some of these bad situations as you could see them as challenges that we just haven't solved yet. So some of these challenges include just how long it takes to fully on board asset owners. We've got a great, a lot of really great engagement from organisations, some of you in this room, but with roughly 700 organisations across England, Wales and Northern Ireland at this current trajectory, it could take us several years to get everybody on board. And when we do have them on board, we have various challenges with getting them to adhere to our data ingestion specification, whether that being them not refreshing their data in the agreed frequency which they suggested, or whether it's them providing the data in a different format to which we initially got it from. So this really is a challenge that we are working through.

Now the next one is quite a big one that everybody always asks us is “Who's going to pay for this? How much is it going to be?” And you know, that is a big question. But so far, the government has fully funded the build project up until the end of September 24. And within our consultation, there was an agreement that those who benefit from the platform should pay.

And lastly, we've been bombarded with, you know, somewhere between 50 to 100 additional use cases for having this consolidated asset data all together. And although we have strictly focused on delivering the platform to support safe digging, we realise that there is more value to be had with NUAR and with the hope that with support from our asset owners and security stakeholders, we'd like to explore this more.

In conclusion the ugly user problems are real and are costing individuals their safety and the UK economy £2.4 billion a year. The good news is that NUAR is well on its way to developing and improving the status quo in this area, with great engagement across the organisations and a platform focused on solving problems. Challenges still exist, but they are surmountable and if there's anything I know about the NUAR team, we will surmount them.

So thank you so much for your time and yeah, let me know if there's any questions.

John Hartshorn: Thank you, Amy. Does anybody have any questions for Amy? Oh yeah, look at this now, yeah, have we got a microphone over here? He looks pretty quiet.

Member of the public: Just in terms of who pays for it, but who pays the data owner to go through the transformation and share their data?

Amy Manefield: So at the moment, the UK government is funding that. So the transformation process, which is being provided by 1Spatial is funded by the government. So at the moment we're doing a lot of work on how we can make that as easy as possible into the future for organisations to adhere to. But it's still very much a working process.

Member of the public: Hello. One of the things I wondered was do you think in the future, once there is like a 3D map essentially made, is that construction workers will be able to use like VR and then be able to work with that on and it will avoid any more incidents in the future like this.

Amy Manefield: I know a lot of people are quite keen on that vision. I think we're still quite a way away from the data quality required to do that accurately, but hopefully through time and through having all this data in one platform, we can get to that end a little bit quicker.

John Hartshorn: I do have one Amy if you don't mind. In the early stages of my career, I did a lot of work with utility companies and they didn't really know where a lot of their assets were underground, so they knew their points of access, but they didn't know where it physically went. Has that changed? Has data improved since then? Or if not, how do they get around that for a project like NUAR?

Amy Manefield: Yeah, I mean, in some cases it has improved, but in other cases, you know, there's still a lot of the network that's, you know, unknown in terms of its actual location. But hopefully with the feedback loop on the platform, every time somebody digs up and finds an asset that wasn't on the map, they can feed it back to the organisation that belongs to, or you know, find out, okay, it's probably one of these people, I'll send it to all of you and then we can start looking at improving those records and a little bit more as a team basically.

John Hartshorn: Are there a lot of warnings around how you use the data in terms of like if you're using this for safe digging, it's still at your responsibility to.

Amy Manefield: Absolutely. Yeah. There's HSG 47 safe digging practices which are very much still in place. And that's part of a key part of the user terms and conditions on the platform so that nobody digging with, you know, looking at the map is going to trust that 100% because we know for a fact, you know, the data is wrong. But what we're doing is putting it all together and just making it easier to access.

John Hartshorn: Brilliant. Excellent. Thank you very much. then Amy, much appreciated.