In recent year, significant technological advances have taken place in various areas, which have brought the feasibility of economically mapping underground infrastructure at the city, regional, and national levels. An understanding of where utilities are located in developed countries around the globe, such as Australia, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom is of utmost priority. Communication in the underground location industry is essential to providing accurate and timely information between unique call centers, servicers, locators, and excavators. However, often even the best simple lines can be broken, either for data transfer or just for communication between various stakeholders. The use of utility technology must be utility driven. Let us look at a few of utility technologies that have brought about significant advances to the utility locating world.

1. Fall Security Pro

Fall safety pro is used in detecting quick movement indicating a fall if workers hold the phone while working. In the event of an accident, the worker can confirm the fall with one click. After sending the confirmation, the app alerts emergency contact and gives the personal location information. In the event of a false alarm, the app provides the employee with a set period to confirm that it is in order. Otherwise, the notice will be sent.

2. NTS (National Fuel Station)

This is an excellent tool for workers who complete excavations. The NTS mobile app prevents accidents, keeping information up-to-date with security requirements.

3. Ground-penetrating radar used to locate unmarked graves

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a handy inspection method for utility locating using GPR-usable tracking equipment; all underground objects would be reflected on the screen as a parabola as they passed the floor. The main components to look for are terrain and reflections of objects on the screening equipment. 

Technology Advancement: An opportunity for the industry

While some may initially resist change, disruptive technologies should not be considered a threat by current players in the sector. History shows that such advances in technology cannot be successfully hindered over a long period and that societies that survive disruptions are the ones who adapt and embrace these changes instead of clinging to the old ways. The benefits to utilities in embracing new technologies are many. Significant socio-economic changes in recent times have led to staff growth. Expert staffs who have been in business for decades and reach retirement and new workers tend to stay in the same position for only 6-7 years. Forecasts predict that this trend will become even more pronounced in the future, with the next generation of workers changing jobs every few years.

In a high-turn situation, individual employees no longer have years to learn the complexity of each task from more experienced employees, and then use that knowledge in the same role for other years before handing it over. For this reason, intuitive utility tracking technologies with intuitive interfaces can be increasingly essential to ensure employees are equipped with the information they need. This is particularly relevant to the location of the utility, considering the drastic consequences of inadequate knowledge of the location of buried services. Reaching underground assets in real-time can lead to severe failures, high financial costs, injuries, and even loss of life. Most utility services cite worker safety and public safety as one of their top priorities.

Unintended disruption of underground assets during excavations, such as electrical cables and gas pipelines, can cause explosions and dangerous fires, resulting in injury or death. Many cases of hospitalized construction workers have occurred in the past, emphasizing the need for a valid location of the company. Contact with less hazardous resources can also cause severe harm and lead to high financial costs and reduced productivity.  Disruptive technologies and digital disturbances, in particular, can seem daunting when first introduced. However, not all innovations are intrinsically destructive to existing players and, most importantly, technological advances are fundamental to the evolution of the sector.

 The next wave of utility innovation

Augmented reality can work with GIS technology, which collects recorded GPS positions from various sources to view your location in the real world. This means that through the mobile device's live video feed, users can view and browse interactive 3D renderings of hidden features such as buried cables or piping. Users can associate geo-tagged photos with these updates, allowing the asset owner to check for updates before they are verified. The ability to report potential failures, security notifications and accurate resource location promptly represent a considerable change in traditional processes, but it also offers significant advantages over existing methods that can cause a human error and take a long time, leaving inaccurate assets recorded. It is this combination of features that has the potential to undermine current utility localization conventions and, in so doing, revolutionize the field to create a more efficient and consistent future.

 Evolving Standards for Identifying Underground Utilities

In recent years, there have been developments that reflect improvements in underground, remote sensing technology. Standards for reporting the reliability of underground utility location information have been in place for decades. In the United States, ASCE 38-02 of 2003, used to classify underground infrastructure location information based on its estimated reliability, is widely considered obsolete. In France, the 2012 presidential decree defines three explicit levels of cartographic accuracy for underground structures; A - less than 40 centimeters, B - 40 centimeters at 1.5 meters and C - greater than 1.5 meters. In the United Kingdom, the 2014 Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 128, developed under the auspices of the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and others, does not only include levels A, B, C, D American standard, but extends it with explicit levels of accuracy from B1 to B3. A review process of PAS 128 has just been launched to reflect the latest technological developments. Currently, the sharing of underground utility information between infrastructure organizations in the same or neighboring jurisdictions has been significantly hampered by inconsistent and incomplete data. The Open Geospatial Partnership (OGC) aims to make a significant contribution to facilitating better management, sharing and collaboration of information that must make infrastructure planning, operations, and care and emergency response less expensive and time-consuming and more efficient. OGC has launched a three-step project to develop interoperability standards for underground infrastructure.