The focus of FIG Commission 6 is to support and accompany the
development and application of innovative and advanced surveying
methodologies and technologies during the design, construction and
operation phases of projects. These can be assigned to several
areas, for example to:
Civil engineering, including structural, hydraulic,
geotechnical and transportation
Mining engineering
Mechanical engineering
Industrial engineering
Energy production
Environmental safety
In civil engineering projects, the engineering surveyor is
responsible for:
surveying the future work sites, which is necessary to
evaluate the local conditions for the establishment of new
structures;
accompanying the construction process, from the staking out
of marks, to the repeated verification of the locations and
dimensions of the structure and its elements, to the as-built
survey at the end;
monitoring the health of structures after their completion
during the operation phase.
Monitoring to assess the safety condition of structures has
special relevance for those structures that entail high potential
risks, like bridges, tunnels or dams. It is an activity that is
present, with regularity, during the lifetime of these structures.
Monitoring plays also an important role in other domains apart from
civil engineering, for example in mining engineering or in
environmental safety (e.g. monitoring of landslides and
earthquakes).
Furthermore, engineering surveyors contribute to smaller projects
that may include the 3D survey of buildings, or of objects like
airplanes, vessels, or cars. The results are dimensionally accurate
surveys that can be used to enable realistic views from the object,
as well as to perform as-built measurements needed to calculate
volume, areas, lengths. These surveys can also become a key
contributor to building information modelling (BIM), augmented
reality projects, land management and spatial planning, hazards
mitigation, just to refer a few.
The capacity of getting data on the geometry and location with
high accuracy enables the engineering surveyor to be involved in
studies that span from environmental safety (landslide and rock fall
monitoring, the impacts of climate change on the earth surface) to
navigation systems, robotics and machine automation. As a
result of the diversity of application areas, the engineering
surveyors have to acquire knowledge across different subjects,
namely to dialogue with other experts from distinctive fields of
knowledge.
To complete the tasks, the engineering surveyor is assisted by
equipment that incorporates the latest advances in measurement
technology. This equipment includes laser scanners (terrestrial or
aerials), robotic total stations, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV),
interferometric synthetic aperture radars (InSAR), and global
navigation satellite positioning systems (GNSS). Many of these
sensors can be used in automatic measuring systems enabling to
autonomously follow the evolution of processes, from construction to
monitoring in real time. They are important tools to alert when an
abnormal behavior occurs, preventing critical issues from occurring.
In order to handle the variety of data types delivered by the broad
range of sensors, engineering surveyors require skills in other
domains than surveying (for instance, photogrammetry and digital
image processing techniques).Concerning the new challenges for the
engineering surveyor, among these is for sure the integration of the
new digital technologies, like those that are already affecting
construction and the built environment: Big Data and Artificial
Intelligence.
