The power of smart geography

Infrastructure projects are now smarter, more agile and more digitally enabled. This helps cut time, cost and carbon, benefitting clients, end users and the environment. It frees engineers to do what they are best at – problem solving.

A smart city is more efficient and resilient, produces more sustainable outcomes and is responsive to changing citizen needs. As the digital world expands, the need for more open and collaborative systems will increase.

Geography finds itself at the heart of the solution in a critical and supporting role: information and collaboration in a geospatial context are crucial to the efficient delivering of infrastructure projects and to effectively maintain assets over their life. When compiling data in order to make decisions, it is not sufficient to know what is occurring and its quantum, it is also crucial to know where it is occurring.

A geographic information system (GIS) is fundamental to any common data environment and is one of the foundational building blocks in moving toward digital twins - virtual models of a process, product or service. GIS systems are a vital part of the digital framework and have been for many years.

But true collaboration cannot be achieved without an easily accessible digital ecosystem. Closed proprietary standards create isolated ecosystems which force consumers into enclosed digital worlds with limited collaboration with the digital fabric of a project. Data can become a prisoner and lose its value, thereby blocking collaboration.

It is now no longer acceptable to have “gatekeepers” of data or technology, and GIS experts want greater autonomy, leading to greater demand for readily available and cost-effective GIS systems.

Our digital solutions platform focuses on delivering tools that provide all project team members with access to core information without requiring any specialist skills. It empowers collaboration at scale and realises the true value of information. Users can collate, interrogate and visualise an extremely complex database of interdependent geospatial information sources.

Moata Geospatial is a highly effective way to make sense of the complexity in the world and infrastructure around us, enabling everyone to view, interpret and act on the same information. This capability was evident in the Heathrow Expansion Project, where the platform was used to compile and manage 1000 individual land use proposals (LUPs) into a single source of truth accessed by more than 300 users on the HEP project team.

For almost a decade, Moata has been deployed on more than 20 major infrastructure projects in the UK, such as HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail, Crossrail 2 and multiple Highways England schemes.

Unlike other systems on the market, which are often too generic and cover many different industries, Moata Geospatial has been built by those who live, breathe and solve many of the infrastructure sector’s most complex challenges. The platform allows users to visualise and interact with spatial information throughout a project lifecycle. It unifies information from multiple sources into a single, authoritative system, and reduces project risks caused by using out-of-date data.

Building a better future

Over 48 hours in 2015-16, Storm Desmond wreaked enormous damage, with almost 800 bridges and 300km of highway in Cumbria damaged or destroyed. Cumbria County Council needed a rapid solution to support the delivery of its Infrastructure Recovery Programme (IRP). Moata Geospatial enabled this. Our platform served as a centralised source for huge quantities of data from 1600 surveys and inspections; land ownership, river levels and traffic regulation could be collated, assessed and managed. Clear visualisation of assets, associated information and work packages provided by Moata Geospatial enabled the council to prioritise works, and supported risk management and investment planning decisions for future resilience.

Moata Geospatial can also be used as an effective asset management tool. Our bespoke customised version of the platform, Brite, has provided Cumbria County Council with a complete street lighting management system and is now used for the operation and maintenance of the county’s 50,000 street lighting assets. During the deployment of Brite, the Moata Geospatial team linked the existing data siloes at the council, creating a system to bring together all lighting asset information.

Brite provides an integrated spatial and tabular view of all the street lighting assets across the county, not only providing full geographical context to the information, but also enabling the council to view asset locations and attributes with ease.

Project teams want to enhance the value of GIS experts, expedite decision-making, distribute ownership, and remove bottlenecks. They want to move towards an interconnected, multi-dimensional network of spatial information. Our aim here at Mott MacDonald is to democratise spatial data, empowering engineers and designers by giving them an intuitive, web-based solution that makes spatial data available to all.

Moata Geospatial can take you there.