Spatio-Temporal Issues in Infrastructure Lifecycle Management Systems

There is much information needed to manage the activities and events that occur throughout the lifecycle of an infrastructure system, such as a bridge, including construction and maintenance activities, inspection data, environmental effects, etc. Conventional infrastructure management systems provide only limited support for representing and visualizing the spatio-temporal relationships within this information. This paper discusses the spatio-temporal issues in infrastructure lifecycle management systems. We start by discussing the requirements for building these systems, such as the integration of information from all stages of the lifecycle, including design, construction, inspection and maintenance; the needs to exchange and share this information across disciplines using standard representation; data models and visualization requirements of 3D and 4D models; and the interaction requirements when using these systems. Then we propose to use an object-relational data model to represent the spatio-temporal data and to base this model on Industrial Foundation Classes (IFC) allowing multiple views of the model. We also discuss a prototype system developed in Java language to demonstrate the proposed approach using the data of Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal. Different data types are integrated to build the spatio-temporal model including CAD data, digital maps, and digital elevation models. The 3D bridge model is linked with different scales of space and time to record events throughout the lifecycle with suitable levels of details. A friendly user interface is designed to retrieve and display scheduling and inspection information directly on the 3D bridge model.