Microfilm digitisation helps Amey save Heathrow Airport thousands of pounds and hours on structural asset inspections
Across the UK civil engineers, construction companies and owners of critical infrastructure are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds and many disruptive hours ensuring bridges, roads, buildings and transport networks are safe and regularly maintained.
That was the challenge facing Amey, the leading provider of full life-cycle engineering, operations, and decarbonisation solutions for UK infrastructure. Heathrow Airport asked Amey to do mandatory inspections on three bridges at Terminal 4 cargo handling.
Lacking legacy plans
The problem – all too common across the industry – was no historical plans or drawings of the bridges. Without these, Amey must physically find out how the bridges were originally constructed, materials used and structural integrity. That is expensive, time consuming and disruptive to the airport’s day-to-day business.
A representative from Amey’s Advisory & Analytics team explained, “Legally, sites like Heathrow Airport must conduct regular inspections on various assets to ensure they are safe. Heathrow has around 80 bridges and while most have documented plans, several do not. Where there is no historical information — as was the case at Terminal 4 — inspection is hard. Literally, you have to semi break the bridge to determine if the structure is still safe.”
But it just so happened that in the past an Amey employee had the foresight to save thousands of old aperture cards and store them at Amey’s design hub at Gatwick Airport. No one knew who owned the cards, but a cursory glance showed that they contained images of historical civil engineering and construction plans.
Unlocking a gold mine of information
Amey wondered if the cards might possibly have some old plans relating to the Terminal 4 bridges. Little could they have imagined the gold mine of information that was about to be uncovered.
Amey called on Document Options to help with a discovery project. An initial trial to digitise 1,000, aperture cards found plans for two of the three Terminal 4 bridges. The potential value the trial suggested spurred Heathrow to get all 22,000 aperture cards digitised.
Steve Entecott, Production Director of Document Options said “Typically, digitised aperture cards are indexed using a reference visible on the digitised image itself. However, for this project, we had to rely on references handwritten on each card. This required additional care and accuracy during the capture process to ensure each digital file could be correctly linked to its physical counterpart so that indexing could be performed efficiently.”
Thousands of hours saved
Artificial intelligence was then used to find and assign additional information to each digital image such as location, name of the asset and date. This automated process saved thousands of hours and an almost impossible task of manually trawling through every image to identify and catalogue information.
Besides avoiding days and weeks of disruptive physical investigations, Amey estimates having the historical plans and construction data has saved £70,000 just on the three Terminal 4 bridges.
“By working with Document Options to scan and digitise these images we can now unlock a huge amount of data. We have realised significant cost and time savings on just three bridges so you can imagine the value that could be gained from all the other images,” said Amey Aviation Delivery Director.
Besides cost and time saving, the digitised and catalogued historical documents can now link to existing and more current digital plans to create a complete historical record of each construction asset.
Key Benefits
Extracts value out of previously unknown, hidden and obsolete data
Saves time and money through better information and decision making
Reduces manual operations and improves safety with less on-site working
Unleashes new technology like AI to maximise and multiply the value of data
Amey plans to use its work with Document Options as a template for helping other clients realise the value they may not know is held in old and inaccessible drawings and documents.
“What Amey has achieved with Document Options is important because almost every client I speak to has documents stored away and held on old, inaccessible formats. With Document Options we have an effective way to digitise those documents and the technology to extract information quickly and automatically. Potentially, that is a huge amount of highly valuable data waiting to be realised.”
