REPORT BACKGROUND
Cost-effective and timely capture of existing conditions has long been an intractable problem for owners, operators, engineers, constructors and surveyors of built assets and civil infrastructure. Developing accurate as-built/as-maintained documentation is in the critical path of all revamp projects, and maintenance, repair, retrofit, revamp and decommissioning need up-to-date documentation of existing physical conditions of the asset or structure. Yet this information is almost never available when needed. The most widely used manual techniques for collecting it remain slow, expensive and error-prone. As a result, engineering and construction work suffers from estimating errors, inaccurate bids, design and fabrication mistakes, expensive field rework, delays, penalties, lost capacity, and squandered profit and opportunity. While estimates vary by industry, many believe that from 2% to 5% project cost savings can be achieved with better capture of existing-conditions information and intelligent use of this information to inform design and construction work processes.
One obstacle is that CAD tools for modeling assets and infrastructure have been geared primarily toward new construction, even though work on existing assets makes up the majority of global engineering and construction spending. Primarily used in the design phase of a project, most CAD models are typically not kept up to date with field changes. And where technologies were developed specifically for capturing existing conditions, these were sometimes oversold, leading to disappointment and diminished appetites for unproven technology.
Today, however, new technologies for capturing existing conditions have begun winning attention from growing numbers of industry best-practice leaders. Based on advances in 3D laser scanning and digital processing of the resulting point-cloud data, the new solutions are being used to deliver material advances in speed, cost, accuracy and efficiency over older tools and methods.
