The Remote-Survey Era: Preliminary Design in a Rapidly Changing Real World

NIKOLAOS STYLIANOS CHANAKOULAS: Greetings to all Autodesk University attendants. My name is Nick Chanakoulos, and I welcome you to our presentation, The Remote Survey Era, Preliminary Design in a Rapidly Changing Real World. If you are into designing, and struggling with, what does my area look like, or if you are looking for ways to avoid design errors, legal costs, deadline delays, then I am pretty sure this presentation will provide you with the right solutions and tools to do so. Hope you enjoy.

And actually, let's begin. A few words about me. I studied civil engineering in the UK, as well as in Greece, where I also did my PhD. Having worked both in design and construction in large scale projects made me realize the main issues and problems that arise in each area, and get a good grasp of the needs and challenges faced by engineers around the world. I firmly believe that excellence comes only if you do what you love, and that true success is to make yourself and the people around you happy.

Actually, these two principles also regulate how we work here at Plexscape, as my colleagues and I strive for excellent services and always saying to make our clients happy and the jobs easier. Now about the learning objectives of this talk, our aim is to make you a design superhero, by showing how you can design efficiently without changing your workflow, right inside AutoCAD and Civil 3D, and how to migrate the imports you will learn later to InfraWorks or other design tools. As such, you will recognize the necessity for on-demand access to aerial or satellite imagery and terrain data, from early design stages.

You will be able to better overcome the risks associated with incomplete understanding of existing project site conditions. You will learn how to access major image providers such as Airbus, Maxar, Nearmap, and Hexagon, from within AutoCAD, and finally, how to utilize Timeviews for historical imagery, or even to promptly see how a disaster has affected your project area. So, as mentioned in the beginning, in this presentation, we will talk about the remote survey era.

But what is that. Well, remote survey is a term we invented here at Plexscape in order to describe the process that covers the need for instant access to real world data, from the very beginning of the various design and construction phases, without having to physically visit the project area. As you know, until now, in order to collect spatial information and identify the local abnormalities, or special characteristics of a field, surveyors had to go on-site, carrying a wide range of tools like total stations or GPS. Then they would process the measurements while being in constant communication with the design engineers.

Being on its own a very time consuming and costly procedure, one more problem arises. In most cases, designers do not have enough time or even the money to get their hands on local surveys. Still though, they have to provide proposals with very strict deadlines. This, of course, leads to significant errors in the preliminary design, repair cost during the construction phase, budget overruns, delays in delivery, and many more.

Therefore, wouldn't it be great if you could have all the survey data beforehand? Wouldn't it make you a better engineer, if you could deliver more accurate designs to your clients, colleagues, or partners? Wouldn't your employer be happier if you could have the best results with less time and money? Well, this is the need the remote survey comes to satisfy, making the design and construction process much easier and enjoyable.

But if you are wondering how we can actually estimate the need of remote survey, let's take a look at what the industry tells us. Chang, in one of his papers, mentions that the redesign costs range from 2.1% to 21.5%. Accounting for about 8.5% of the construction change cost on average, the redesign cost can be equivalent to the fee of a new design project. In a similar study conducted in 1994, it is mentioned that the direct costs of rework have been found to range between 10% to 15% of the construction value.

Not only that, in an article titled Five Mistakes Civil Engineers Should Avoid, the third most important mistake is not having a holistic view of a project, thus ignoring key components. Finally, according to a study of 2018, the sixth most important delay cause for the completion of a project is the underestimation of costs, due to insufficient feasibility studies and surveys. Therefore, if someone asks how we can avoid the redesigns, reworks, design mistakes and delays, well, the answer is by remote survey.

But how did the concept of remote survey come into being? Well, can you see the red circle here? This is where it all began. Lambros Kaliakatsos, the founder and CEO of our company, Plexscape, in his first steps as an engineer, was participating in the design of several sanitary landfill and dump site restoration projects. In this particular case, after the team he was participating in spent months of hard work in design and consultation, the construction began.

But reality changed their design plans. The terrain was different than what they thought and designed for. It was extremely steep, covered in dense vegetation. The northwestern part was difficult to approach and, even worse, a local shepherd was housing sheep there. It was impossible to locate him. The company had to just start all over again, changing the initial plans completely.

The final numbers were really shocking. In a 6 million euros project, the redesign in cost was more than 600,000, plus four months of delay. The impact was so big that it put the whole project in danger and harmed the company's reputation. And all this because someone made a guess, instead of investigating the area and getting a good grasp of the whole field.

At that time Lambros thought, if only we had access to high quality imagery, like Google Earth, in AutoCAD. He realized that, if they wanted to stay in business, they needed to have a better understanding of a project site's existing conditions, right from the very beginning. The concept of remote survey was born, and Lambros defined the rules.

He decided that they had to find a way to identify satellite images and acquire terrain data and various ground attributes they should be aware of, from the comfort of their office, even before getting their hands on the relevant data submitted by the surveyors. Furthermore, he realized that they had to come up with ways of drafting scenarios and evaluating the feasibility of different solutions at an early stage. The result would be reduced risk and saving a lot of time and money.

All that was missing was the medium. And that's how Plex-Earth was created. Plex-Earth is the first and the absolute software for remote surveying, as it was created based on exactly that idea, to provide engineers the ability to acquire real life data and have a complete geographical view of the working sites from the convenience of their offices, or, as the current situation dictates, from the convenience of their home, within a few minutes.

Just also mention that Plex-Earth is being developed by Plexscape since 2009, and it's used by thousands of engineers, and some of the most notable firms worldwide, as it greatly accelerates the design process of AEC projects. If you are wondering how this is done, let's find out. The main features of Plex-Earth are five, and this is why we parallel them with five dimensions, as the engineer is introduced to a new design world.

Assets with Plex-Earth, you can, one, import high resolution satellite and aerial imagery from a number of providers into AutoCAD drawings. Two, import terrain data, create contour lines, and perform advanced terrain analysis. Three, publish both 2D and 3D drawings to Google Earth for visualization purposes and to easily share designs with partners and stakeholders.

Moreover, you can import KML and KMZ files into AutoCAD. Four, this is really exciting as well, you can have access to historical imagery data sets and monitor projects in areas throughout time. The world is constantly changing, so must our designs. And five, georeference a drawing. But let's get to know each feature much better.

The first dimension is the ability to import satellite and aerial imagery into AutoCAD drawings. Imagery is a very important and powerful tool for engineering and can help the designer to specify all the potential solutions, to get a general idea of the current situation, to design with better accuracy, to get important site details, and to avoid time and money-consuming redesigns. Plex-Earth 5D acts as a host to the best imagery providers, namely Google Maps, Airbus, Maxar, Nearmap, Hexagon OpenStreetMap, and actually, 20 tile bigger mesh or Tile Server, available on the internet.

There are two ways to import the imagery with Plex-Earth 5D, by quick view which is a very quick, dynamic way to cover an area with a single image, or by creating a mosaic, which covers an area with multiple images for high quality. All the images are placed properly aligned, in zero reference, in a matter of seconds or minutes, no matter the size of the area. Moreover, by converting the imported imagery to a raster image, the DWG file can also be used to other software as well, like InfraWorks or Avid. I will not go through much details about how you can use our software, as we have prepared some live demo sessions for that.

And I encourage you all to join them for better understanding of our software. With Plex-Earth 5D, you can make fast decisions with greater confidence by browsing the latest time-based aerial and satellite photographs of your project area. Now let's move to the second dimension. Do you want to acquire terrain data without having to go there? There is only one way, the remote way.

With Plex-Earth, that's very easy. You can spot every bump, deep channel, ridge, or generally any obstruction that exists on the site and the surrounding area. Create in AutoCAD your terrain morphology, contour lines, import thousands of elevation points, perform advanced terrain analysis, and get valuable information in your hands from the beginning of your design. You can even combine imagery and terrain in order to create 3D imagery for visualization purposes.

Speaking of visualization, Plex-Earth is the perfect tool in that area as well, with its ability to easily utilize Google Earth and visualize within its environment AutoCAD projects by exporting any drawing to KML or KMZ files. It allows the designer to see how their 2D or 3D models dynamically interact with a real environment, and to present their ideas to colleagues, clients, and stakeholders.

However, the communication does not end here, as the user can directly copy, paste Google Earth elements like place marks or any other layer in AutoCAD, and vice versa, for better digitalization and design. Google Earth can be a real asset for any engineer. After all, this is from where the idea of remote surveying came into being.

Time, they say, is the fourth dimension, and Timeviews does exactly that. It puts time in remote survey. This innovative feature of Plex-Earth 5D gives unique capabilities to the engineers of the world by allowing them to create a chronological visualization of the area of interest from a variety of historical imagery data sets that can go up to just a couple of days before. As such, professionals are able to observe the progress of a project, to track all the changes made in the construction fields or mines throughout time, or even see the real effects of natural disasters on work sites.

We are proud to partner directly with Airbus and Maxar, the biggest satellite imagery providers, only to make yesterday's impossible possible for all engineers worldwide. For example, here you can see the progression of the Sydney stadium, as well as the effect of the Evia wildfire in the summer of 2021. See it before, see it now, see what changed.

This is the final feature of Plex-Earth, and although may not seem like it, is very important. The first thing before applying any command is georeferencing. This way, all the imported or exported data will be placed in the correct position. Apart from choosing among literally thousands of coordinate systems, the engineer can also relate a point in Google Earth to a point in AutoCAD, for automatically georeference, apply automatic displacements, and retrieve recently used georeference choices.

For users who set up their geolocation in AutoCAD, Plex-Earth can, of course, read these settings. I am pretty sure that by now you have understood the concept of remote survey and how Plex Earth is a perfect tool for practicing it. But the practical example works on 1,000 presentations. So let's see some actual cases sent to us from our clients.

In our first case study, designers from Engineers Without Borders wanted to help the community of Papachacra in Bolivia to find solutions to their water supply. By using Plex Earth, they were able to identify from satellite images, ground attributes they should be aware of, and identify key issues, like low water pressure and areas with high risk for erosion damage, before even traveling to Bolivia. In our second case, HHO from Cape Town in South Africa were offered the 60 kilometers road project, including a bridge, 2,000 kilometers away from them in Zambia.

The catch, they had to provide the preliminary sketches really quick. With a perfect application of the remote survey principles, they were able to remain in Cape Town and use Plex Earth to extract and geographically position aerial imagery and contours along the entire route. This way they achieved the preliminary design a long way before getting the required measurements from the surveyors.

Similarly, in dynamic engineering, by using Plex Earth during the design process, they can quickly download terrain and generate contours for the conceptual layout phase of their projects. Moreover, they create KML files with control points right from their AutoCAD drawings to guide their aerial survey teams. Finally, one more case of practicing the principles of remote survey is by Farrell's Excavating Limited, where they need to cover large areas in their designs with up-to-date imagery for various decision making.

The ability of Plex Earth to combine images and scaling up-to-date imagery saved them from this time consuming and prone to errors process, which were making manual. With just a few clicks, they are able to match Google Earth with Civil 3D and vice versa. Plex Earth, they say, is a game changer for them.

The remote survey is here today. But what about the future? Evolution is a mandatory part of our job, and here in Plexscape we always strive for excellence and innovation. Drones adoption in AEC increases exponentially in the last years, because anyone can get incredibly realistic 3D views of the project with exceptional accuracy.

However, our challenge was to find a way to make it remotely, without having you to travel hundreds or thousand miles away or bother with the permits and insurances required for professional use, which can take weeks to arrange. That would mean cost would be dramatically increased, and time factor will go away as well. What would you say if you could order drone data from the convenience of your office, again, and getting high quality information within a short time, straight to your computer?

Get ready. We prepare our network and soon we will make this public. And if you would like to be among the first to have access, let us know. As we're getting close to the end of our presentation, let me sum up. The remote survey allows engineers to acquire real life data for their projects, without having to leave their offices. Plex-Earth 5D is the perfect tool for this process, one, by porting up to date or historical high quality imagery, two, by importing terrain, and three, through the communication of Google Earth with AutoCAD.

As a result, the engineers and their companies can save time, money, and design much better and easier. I know, plot serving and conceptual design were never that easy. The presentation, unfortunately, came to its end. Before we go, I would really like to hear your questions. Just to say a quick thanks for watching and to Autodesk for hosting this event.

If you want to be a part of remote survey, you can visit our website, plexearth.com, or contact us directly at support@plexscape.com. As I said, we will be having three demo sessions for our software. So feel free to join our virtual booth here for more information I really look forward to see you joining our Plex Earth community.