This spring, the U.S. Coast Guard's civil engineers will begin presenting a new kind of master plan. It ultimately will consist of integrated, Internet-accessible electronic data models of all of USCG Group Charleston's land-based assets and facilities, with indexes attached to many components identifying their importance to mission performance.

(Map By Nancy Soulliard for ENR; Renderings Courtesy of AEC Infosystems)

  The project is part of the Coast Guard's Shore Facility Capital Asset Management initiative. It uses digital models to integrate resources for planning, investing, using and divesting decisions. The goal is to better align facilities with mission requirements, consistent with budget realities, says Lt. Cmdr. Jack Dempsey, co-program manager. "We're building a Geospatial construct," he says. "Basically, it's a natural hub for connected and integrated decision-making."

The regional prototype being developed for the Charleston-area facilities involves an object-based database of the group's land side structures, created with Graphisoft's ArchiCAD architectural software. It also includes geographic information system representations of the group's scattered stations, warehouses, docks, offices and other properties. ArchiCAD is being used in the prototype because of its adherence to international interoperability conventions, Dempsey says.

3D CAD models: Stations include components and also weigh their significance.

The integrated model is expected to capture and display physical data about land-based assets, but also will weigh the operational importance of objects within the model, down to components such as electrical panels, service lines, doors and piers. This will let facilities planners take into account the effects of planned maintenance and construction projects on the group's ability to meet its operational obligations. Objects will be assigned a criticality value of 1 to 100 to help guide allocation of limited resources. Dempsey says logistical issues have to be approached differently from operational ones. In logistics, the process is one of assessment and planning and the weighing of competing needs, and then finding the money to pay for them. "It comes down to making business cases to get the assets where they are needed," Dempsey says.

This Mission Dependency Index system will be created through a series of detailed interviews with managers in charge of stations, warehouses, piers, hangers and other structures. They break down and evaluate the components within their domains and identify those whose failure would degrade operational capability. The MDI scores become part of the data assigned to features in the object-based CAD data model, and can be called out and searched for when facilities plans are being made.

 A stuck door on a hanger may be no big deal, until the helicopter can't get out and somebody dies," says Dianne Davis, president of AEC InfoSystems Inc., Baltimore, describing an object that might carry a high MDI score. Her architectural/engineering company specializing in modeling with ArchiCAD has been developing the CAD models for the project.

"To have the object and the virtual model carry that kind of information about them becomes very important to the planning of how and where we are spending our money," Davis says. The tool already has been used to assess security at Charleston facilities, saving many days of on-the-ground assessment.

By using visual decision-making tools and bringing object-based 3D CAD and GIS models to the conference room, the developers hope to improve the Coast Guard's ability to prioritize and coordinate planning and design smarter, more secure facilities, while keeping successful mission performance paramount, Dempsey says.  

Al Moulton, president of Graphisoft U.S. Inc., Newton, Mass., says his company is developing a CAD/GIS interface as a work-around to the lack of common standards between these two data structures. The approach will place subsets of data representing building shell information from ArchiCAD's object based model in the GIS database. This would give GIS users accurate exterior detail. But if CAD object model data needs to be extracted about the structure, the image would act like a hyperlink to switch the query to ArchiCAD and load its building data.

The big underlying message of this particular project is the ability to share information." Moulton says.