The importance of extreme events from climate change, weather, and accidents continue to have critical impacts on infrastructure. Underground infrastructures are interconnected within one another and with above ground infrastructure. These interdependencies often have cascading impacts on electric power, water, transportation and communication with extreme social and economic impacts. Increasing community resilience depends upon identifying underground infrastructure data and data sharing. Such underground infrastructure data are not readily known, available, or interoperable. Furthermore, they are typically under multiple jurisdictions. The UNUM project provides a collaborative mechanism for data sharing among government, industry, utilities, and community groups with different data security requirements. Two pilot areas are used within New York City, midtown East (Manhattan) and Sunset Park (Brooklyn), contrasting in the types of underground conditions, stakeholders, and demographic and economic diversity. In Stage 1, commitments to participate in data sharing were obtained from over 40 stakeholders through a data repository managed by a City agency that provide the foundation for Stage 2. This Stage 2 project has broader impacts in providing a roadmap and two testbeds for a data model, data needs, sharing, and security protocols for underground infrastructures transferable to other areas to improve their resilience.
Goals and Scope of Research and Methods and Approaches: UNUM Phase 2 expects to develop a methodology to standardize underground infrastructure and geological data sharing so that all subsurface utility information is made interoperable: capable of being brought together on a common basemap for integration and analysis. This will better enable (1) to identify hazard and disaster vulnerabilities, (2) devise strategies to reduce accidents and emergencies, and (3) to harden infrastructure in case of natural disasters and other large-scale threats like sea level rise and global warming. Based on relationships and agreements with utilities established in UNUM Stage 1, UNUM Stage 2 will collect infrastructure data related to water and sewer networks (NYC DEP), transit (MTA), electric power (Con Edison and National Grid), etc. Subsurface utility data will be transformed into a common format, registered to NYC’s photogrammetric basemap, and securely stored. The data will conform to the MUDDI data model now in advanced development by the Open Geospatial Consortium, and will be closely related to underground infrastructure ASCE 38 and 75 standards for engineering quality and accuracy. The UNUM team will co-develop with community groups art and engineering activities to improve community-based infrastructure literacy.
This project is part of the CIVIC Innovation Challenge which is a collaboration of NSF, Department of Energy Vehicle Technology Office, Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. More information can be found here.