AEC TECH NEWS: BARTHAUER offers integrated management of municipal infrastructure

Bundling resources, improving efficiency, and thereby minimizing costs – that is what integrated infrastructure management can do. In theory the requirement is simple: manage together instead of separately. A joint basis of information is needed to succeed. This is provided by BARTHAUER’s infrastructure information system.

Municipal infrastructure has been constructed and continuously expanded over long periods spanning several generations. Financed by taxpayers’ money and fees, it is a municipality’s biggest asset and primarily serves to supply the residents as prescribed by law. Now municipalities are faced with the complex task of maintaining this infrastructure. But municipalities also have to cut costs! This is driving demand for the resource and cost-effective management of the municipal infrastructure, for example by coordinating construction measures between specialist departments.

Unfortunately, this is still seldom realized in practice. “A street is repaved, and three or four weeks later it is torn up again,” said Managing Director Jürgen Barthauer. “This causes residents to shake their heads in disbelief and rightly ask whether those in charge could not coordinate things better.”

According to BARTHAUER, other providers are making initial attempts to coordinate approved measures. “But our approach goes further,” Barthauer said. “Not only does it give operators the opportunity to manage the above and below-ground street space in 3D, it also supports the calculation and cost analysis of all material assets as well as the maintenance and rehabilitation costs. This greatly simplifies the optimization of measures for the operators.”

The infrastructure information system BaSYS forms the basis. As an IT platform for cooperation across divisions, it follows an integrative approach. With a shared data pool, it converges all deployed programs of the participating service providers. Information is always current and accessible. Provided of course that all measures are documented in the system and reconciled regularly.

With the infrastructure information system BaSYS, BARTHAUER offers all operators a comprehensive tool for the planning, administration, operation and updating of infrastructure objects. Data for the above and below-ground infrastructure are maintained and updated centrally. The data can be made available to various jurisdictions with corresponding access rights. Thanks to the open database structure, additional specialized technical applications can be integrated in the future if this becomes necessary due to legal requirements and directives.

“When I consider what congestion caused by poorly coordinated construction sites means for individual citizens and think of the resulting loss of lifetime, it adds up to centuries that naturally mean lost productivity as well,” Barthauer said. “Then there are the environmental and health aspects related to air pollution caused by combustion engines left running in traffic jams. Optimizing rehabilitation strategies would therefore result in economic gains because part of the time savings could be used productively again.”

Additional modules and functionalities are currently under development, such as cadastres for small-scale wastewater treatment plants and compensation areas as well as SCADA systems. A pipeline integrity management system is currently being developed for the oil and gas transportation sector.