3D Data Modelling for Underground Land Administration
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2023-09
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Melbourne Authors
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Infrastructure Engineering
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PhD thesis
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Open Access
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© 2024 Bahram Saeidian
Abstract
Rapid urbanisation and limited land availability have led to increased use of underground spaces over the last decades. Underground assets such as utilities, tunnels, and walkways are essential for the efficient planning and functioning of cities. This increased utilisation of subterranean space has created a rise in its value, highlighting the significance of legal and physical dimensions of underground environments. Underground land administration (ULA) is critical for sustainable urban development. Digital data plays an underpinning role in managing underground spaces. From ULA's perspective, there exist three important underground data elements including physical, legal, and survey data. Physical data includes the spatial and semantic information about the physical reality of underground assets while legal data defines the spatial and semantic information about the ownership spaces and boundaries associated with these assets. Finally, survey data elements are required to define underground legal boundaries and connect underground legal spaces to a geodetic survey network.
Underground land information currently exists in silo and fragmented 2D environments and requires extensive consolidation before it becomes usable. In the current practices, 2D survey plans and maps are used to manage and communicate underground physical, legal, and survey datasets. These 2D approaches do not integrate the physical location and legal ownership of underground assets in a common data environment, leading to critical challenges related to data communication and management when planning and developing underground projects. To minimise the impacts of underground projects on third-party properties and assets, several pages of 2D floor plans, cross-sectional diagrams, isometric representations, and textual notations should be reviewed to obtain a consolidated representation of physical, legal, and survey data, which is a cognitively challenging task. In addition, legal data are stored, managed, and communicated at a parcel scale, and there is no 3D land administration data model at a city scale for underground areas.
3D data modelling is one of the first and fundamental steps towards implementing a 3D integrated digital model of underground assets and the rights, restrictions, and responsibilities (RRRs) associated with these assets. Therefore, this PhD research has developed a new 3D data model at a city scale to support integrated management of underground physical, legal, and survey data elements. This data model is based on the CityGML standard as a prominent 3D city-scale data model that is used to represent objects with respect to their 3D geometries and semantics. An application domain extension (ADE) for CityGML 3.0, which is called VicULA ADE, was developed at the conceptual, logical, and physical encoding levels to store, manage, and communicate 3D underground land information at a city scale. The VicULA ADE includes three modules to model geometries, semantics, attributes, and relationships between various types of underground physical assets, legal spaces and boundaries, and survey elements in an integrated 3D environment. The VicULA ADE was implemented and prototyped for several complex underground case study areas to demonstrate the feasibility and practical integration of physical, legal, and survey data elements.
The findings show that the VicULA ADE provides a new solution for the integrated management of underground datasets. This integrated 3D data model improves the communication, understanding, and interpretation of underground physical, legal, and survey data and provides a more understandable and superior representation of underground land information compared to current fragmented and isolated 2D approaches. The VicULA ADE also plays an underpinning role in use cases of ULA beyond land registration, such as planning and development of underground projects and underground asset management. Therefore, integrated representation of underground land information using the VicULA ADE can potentially offer significant benefits such as reducing legal disputes, economic losses, and social issues in underground space management.
This research proposes a new technical approach for consolidating physical, legal, and survey data associated with underground assets in a 3D city model. This approach addresses the limitations of previous studies which were limited to only physical, legal, or survey data at a building or parcel scale. Additionally, the CityGML VicULA ADE provides a wide range of semantic relationships between underground physical, legal, and survey data elements. The new implementation pipeline developed in this research comprises the key steps for transforming underground physical, legal, and survey datasets to an integrated 3D underground model, which provides valuable knowledge inputs for future studies in 3D underground data integration. In particular, the 3D integrated underground data model is developed based on the specific requirements defined in the Victorian jurisdiction of Australia. However, the proposed approach can be replicated in other jurisdictions by adjusting the data requirements for managing underground land information.
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Keywords
Underground space, Land administration, 3D cadastre, Subsurface space management, 3D data modelling, CityGML, City model, 3D data integration