2011 to today, year by year.
Deliveries since 2011, roughly fifty a year today, across software, IT, voice and applied R&D.
Epcotec started in Edmonton, Alberta in 2011 with six projects, one method and one conviction: measurement-grade survey fused with software, delivered by senior engineers. Fifteen years later the record runs from steel plants in Hamilton to the Great Barrier Reef, from controlled-access government estates to national clinical registries, at roughly fifty engagements a year. The company got here as a team: the founder had the initiative, and the practice areas, technologies and growth belong to the four leads and the people around them. Since 2011 every engagement has advanced engineering through software, and the field record and the platforms read as one practice. The complete register of engagements, one row each, lives on the delivery register page.
How the practice is built.
Three delivery disciplines, one continuum: field engineering, software & IT, and AI & voice converge in every engagement.
756 deliveries across the disciplines
Every number below is a delivered engagement, 2011 to today, counted by discipline.
Field & engineering: geomatics, infrastructure, environment
Software, IT & voice: platforms, AI & telephony
Delivered engagements, year by year.
More than a hundred engagements a year
Past one hundred a year for the first time, across both entities.
Volume crossed one hundred engagements this year, across two entities and every practice area. The linear optics R&D group continues industrialising the published principle, and the delivery governance that started with six Edmonton surveys now scales across all of it.
AI platform deliveries at volume
Australia and CanadaClient & task
Enterprise and government clients adopting AI under compliance pressure.
Grounded RAG assistants, agent platforms and evaluation gates in CI, delivered as a repeatable product line.
Complexities we solved
- Volume multiplies edge cases: the evaluation harness generalised so new clients inherit tested defaults, grounding and refusal behaviour measured before go-live.
Result
AI delivery became a product line, with new clients onboarding in days onto tested defaults.
Linear optics industrialisation continues
AustraliaClient & task
The published principle moving from bench to application.
Continue industrialisation of the guided-discharge principle across deposition, sterilisation and static-dissipation applications on automated characterisation harnesses.
Complexities we solved
- Each application owns its own regime: characterisation first, application second, harness runs versioned in code and comparable across regimes.
Result
A working R&D-to-engineering handover model, reproducible run by run, that other studios study.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2026: Tender-response delivery in two business days, voice and ICT operations, and the next cohort of graduate engineers.
Eighty-six deliveries
Eighty-six deliveries across every practice, in three countries.
Eighty-six deliveries across every practice area. Integration and modernisation run as parallel programmes; document intelligence and voice operate as product lines; the tender engine answers RFPs within two business days.
Integration and modernisation at fleet scale
Australia and CanadaClient & task
Owners replacing records, ERP overlays and legacy viewers across portfolios.
Strangler-pattern modernisations and integration layers on Terraform-declared infrastructure, delivered in parallel.
Complexities we solved
- Parallel programmes share nothing at first glance: shared patterns (characterisation tests, reconciliation gates, IaC baselines) made them repeatable across portfolios.
Result
Modernisations delivered with no freeze windows, rollbacks rehearsed, across the portfolio.
Document intelligence at 2.4 million pages
CanadaClient & task
A document estate no human review cycle could clear.
Classification, extraction and review pipelines over 2.4 million pages on open-weight models, with human-in-the-loop gates.
Complexities we solved
- Accuracy claims had to survive sampling audits: every extraction carried confidence and provenance, the evaluation harness drawing audit samples continuously in CI.
Result
Review cycles compressed from months to days at audit-verified accuracy, per-field confidence surfaced to reviewers.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2025: Voice rollouts, AI platform deliveries entering repeatable product lines, the next cohort of graduate engineers.
Voice at carrier standards, security as evidence
Sixty-four deliveries. Voice now runs at carrier standards, and security ships with evidence.
Sixty-four deliveries. The telephony thread that opened in 2016 reaches product grade: a complete voice platform run for clients across the United States and Canada. Security work matures from review to evidence systems.
Voice platform across North America
United States and CanadaClient & task
Hospitality and professional-services clients in the United States and Canada.
The full phone system, SIP interconnects included, run for them, with an optional AI receptionist layer.
Complexities we solved
- Carrier-grade telephony leaves no room for demo-grade engineering: numbers, SIP trunks, IVR, queues, recording and porting were all delivered to carrier standards, media paths containerised for failover.
Result
A repeatable voice product line deployed from shared templates across the United States and Canada.
GRC evidence system for audit-grade compliance
AustraliaClient & task
A client whose compliance evidence lived in screenshots and mail threads.
A GRC evidence system: controls mapped to artefacts, collected continuously by code, auditable on demand.
Complexities we solved
- Auditors trust systems, not narratives: every artefact carries provenance back to the control and the collector run that produced it.
Result
Audit cycles shortened from weeks of collation to hours of export from the evidence store.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2024: CIAM rollouts, platform stabilisations, evaluation harnesses in production, team extensions across time zones.
Fifty-one deliveries of shipped software
Fifty-one deliveries of shipped software: portals, platforms, data systems.
Fifty-one deliveries: the software practice deepens. Registries, data platforms and intelligence pipelines ship as governed software, with the same measurement discipline the field years were built on.
National clinical registry, modernised
CanadaClient & task
A university-led national clinical registry programme.
Entry, validation, reporting and multi-clinic access modernised on governed Go services.
Complexities we solved
- Legacy data quality was unknown until reconciled: characterisation tests pinned legacy behaviour before any of it was replaced.
- Access rules differ per clinic, role and study: authorisation centralised, evaluated per request, provable in audit.
Result
Migration signed off line by line; 14 clinics onboarded in the first wave on the new access model.
Market-data pipelines at exchange discipline
AustraliaClient & task
A client moving market-sensitive feeds off brittle point tools.
Exactly-once market-data pipelines in Go with replay and audit, run under exchange-grade monitoring.
Complexities we solved
- Duplicates are unacceptable and gaps are unacceptable: idempotent offsets, replayable logs and reconciliation counts settled both sides, proven under replay drills.
Result
Go pipelines holding exactly-once delivery across months of continuous operation, replay-tested in CI.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2023: Document intelligence at scale, CIAM foundations, security engineering engagements, team extensions.
Software & AI engineering at product scale
Fourteen deliveries, and the software-and-AI thread running through every year since 2011 becomes the practice's leading edge.
Fourteen deliveries, and the demand the software thread has built steadily since 2011 moves to the head of the record: AI platforms, product engineering, cloud rescue, data and MLOps, security, integration and voice. The delivery governance built over a decade (fixed scope, weekly demos, staging from week one) now ships software.
Grounded assistant inside a government boundary
AustraliaClient & task
A government agency with 40,000+ documents and PROTECTED-level expectations.
An on-tenancy RAG assistant on Kubernetes with citation-grade grounding and permission inheritance.
Complexities we solved
- Answers had to inherit document permissions at retrieval time, filtered per user before generation.
- Answer drift after model changes was unmeasurable: groundedness scoring on held-out questions became a release gate in CI.
Result
P95 latency 2.1 s, groundedness 0.94 on held-out questions, zero data-egress findings, evaluation gate enforced in CI.
Payments platform made boring to deploy
AustraliaClient & task
A payments platform with recurring incidents and a climbing cloud bill.
GitOps deploys, declarative and reversible on Terraform infrastructure, plus a credible cost plan.
Complexities we solved
- Releases were hand-assembled: rebuilt as declarative manifests, every apply planned and reviewable before merge.
- Incidents surfaced only when customers noticed: health-gated rollouts with automatic rollback replaced late discovery.
Result
GitOps with health-gated rollback on every release; MTTR from four hours to 22 minutes; 34% run-rate reduction from the companion infrastructure audit.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2022: Evaluation harness foundations, security reviews, the first MLOps toolchain deployments.
The specialist sensing years
Nine deliveries. Specialist remote-sensing work at compressed timelines.
Nine deliveries, and the studio's remote-sensing technologies are provisioned into demanding specialist programmes.
Multi-spectral detection provisioned for a specialist programme
Remote programmeClient & task
A specialist remote-sensing programme under compressed timelines.
HFTRS-derived multi-spectral detection: signature libraries for equipment and land-cover classes trained on multispectral archives, fused passes holding detection through visual masking.
Complexities we solved
- Masking engineered against visual and thermal bands: signatures outside those bands carried detection, classifiers tuned to hold recall under masking.
- Reporting timelines were measured in hours: the containerised pipeline delivered georeferenced products on the same clock it was validated on.
Result
Detection held through masking across delivered passes; the containerised pipeline ran on operational timelines.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2021: Remote AI tooling adoption inside the studio: the software thread that has run since 2011 takes the delivery lead.
COVID, and remote delivery rebuilt
A broken year, rebuilt remote. Twelve deliveries.
Twelve deliveries. COVID cuts delivery volume and the team rebuilds delivery for remote work: commissioning, migration and telemetry without boots on site.
Remote telemetry commissioning
Remote deliveryClient & task
A client commissioning sensor infrastructure while field crews were grounded.
Telemetry commissioning performed fully remotely: site gateways configured through local partners against remote test rigs, configurations shipped as versioned scripts.
Complexities we solved
- No boots on site meant no manual retries: idempotent, self-verifying scripts were containerised and re-run until remote diagnostics went green.
Result
Sites commissioned remotely, zero-touch after handover, with documented equivalence to on-site practice.
Cloud migration for a stranded on-premise platform
Remote deliveryClient & task
A client whose on-premise platform could not be visited or scaled.
Full migration to cloud, declared in Terraform, with minimal on-site dependency.
Complexities we solved
- Years of undocumented configuration: automated discovery preceded any move, captured state replayed in staging containers before cutover.
Result
Platform migrated during restrictions with zero data loss, now reproducible from code.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2020: Remote asset-management support, ICT health checks for stranded municipal networks.
The Nature-published principle, and the reef
Seventy-six deliveries, plus a research principle published in Nature and tested on the reef.
Seventy-six deliveries, the busiest year to that point. A discharge-guidance principle is published in the Nature portfolio in 2020 (work linked to ANU: electrical discharges guided by optically trapped graphene microparticles, cutting the discharge threshold by about 30%). Within the studio it belongs to the workflow itself: science engagement feeding directly into the linear optics R&D practice. The business expands to Queensland, from Gold Coast roads and highways to remote councils, Cairns and the far north: detailed plant and animal population surveys, and iconic Great Barrier Reef scanning through airborne equipment.
Queensland council and highway programmes
Gold Coast to far north QueenslandClient & task
Councils from the Gold Coast to remote far-north Queensland.
Roads and highways infrastructure surveys and condition programmes across dispersed councils, unified into one PostGIS schema.
Complexities we solved
- Distances made mobilisation the cost driver: sorties were multi-council by design, per-council deliverables split in ETL and certified per council before release.
Result
Programme economics, one schema serving many councils, that made remote-council surveys affordable.
Far-north forest population surveys
Far north QueenslandClient & task
Far-north region forests needing plant species, density and animal population evidence.
Multispectral swarm surveys mapped plant species and density by supervised classification; acoustic and thermal passes supported animal population evidence.
Complexities we solved
- Canopy closure hid ground layers: lidar vertical profiles carried understorey structure where imagery could not, swarm passes batch-processed in cloud-hosted containers.
- Species libraries for far-north flora were thin: lab capture runs built the missing codes before classifiers were trusted in the field.
Result
Population and density evidence accepted by environmental reviewers on validated classifiers.
Great Barrier Reef airborne scanning
Great Barrier Reef, QueenslandClient & task
Iconic reef programmes requiring non-contact data collection over protected marine structures.
Airborne reef scanning and data collection: structure extents, shallows and changes captured without touching the reef, bathymetric returns fused with spectral bands.
Complexities we solved
- Permits and reef protection rules bound every pass: flight and sensor plans were approved before a single sortie, aerial routes pre-filed against exclusion zones.
- Water clarity governed band choice: passes were keyed to measured clarity windows, fusion weights adjusted per pass.
Result
Reef structure datasets, clarity-annotated per pass, delivered under full environmental compliance.
Linear optics R&D lab stood up
Epcotec linear optics R&D labClient & task
The published principle needed a working practice behind it.
Stand up the linear optics R&D lab: beamline, particle-replenishment design, scripted characterisation harnesses and the safety regime.
Complexities we solved
- A published principle is not a product: the lab industrialised repetition and measurement, harnesses versioned in code, before any application work.
Result
The R&D practice that now feeds applied engagements from feasibility to TRL-raise on instrumented, repeatable runs.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2019: Environmental compliance programmes, reef-partner data pipelines, the first optically-guided discharge client trials.
Heavy infrastructure, forensics and the farm gate
Heavy infrastructure, forensic investigations, far-west farm gates. Sixty-nine deliveries in total.
Sixty-nine deliveries in the far west of New South Wales: wastewater treatment plants, roads, hydrology and hydraulics, terrestrial remote sensing, asset management and control, farming, expert witnessing and forensic investigations. Civil, structural and municipal engineering now collaborate with laser technologies, photogrammetry, forensics and the ICT layer as one practice.
Wastewater treatment plant programmes
Far west New South WalesClient & task
Far-west NSW treatment plants with paper records and ageing process equipment.
Structural condition, process telemetry and asset registers migrated by ETL into one schema for treatment plant upgrades.
Complexities we solved
- Paper instrument records carried transcription errors: double-entry digitisation with scripted continuity checks preceded any analytics, exceptions resolved before load.
Result
Upgrade programmes scoped on measured, reconciled evidence.
Flood-resilient far-west road networks
Far west New South WalesClient & task
Road networks that flood, cut communities off and burn maintenance budgets.
Hydrology and hydraulics studies fused from lidar terrain in PostGIS, with resilience ranking per segment.
Complexities we solved
- Flat terrain makes flow paths ambiguous: culvert and grade enforcement from imagery preceded modelling, every enforced breakline traceable in the geodatabase.
Result
Segment-ranked resilience programmes accepted by council and state funders on traceable terrain evidence.
Farming and water investigations
Far west New South WalesClient & task
Farm enterprises needing storage, irrigation and land-form evidence.
On-farm storage volumes, irrigation layouts and land-form surveys from fused acquisition, volumes computed from the classified cloud.
Complexities we solved
- Property boundaries and water entitlements interlocked: surveys were tied to entitlement maps in the geodatabase, keeping every volume computation defensible.
Result
Investment decisions taken on measured storage and layout data with entitlement traceability.
Forensic and expert-witness investigations
New South WalesClient & task
Disputes and insurance matters requiring measurement-grade evidence.
Forensic measurement investigations with an evidence chain from epoch to exhibit that holds in proceedings.
Complexities we solved
- Evidentiary standards exceed engineering standards: chain-of-custody, instrument calibration and repeatability were documented end to end, every exhibit regenerable from sealed raw epochs by scripted reprocessing.
Result
Reports accepted in proceedings without challenges to method or custody.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2018: Culvert inventories, asset-control system rollouts, stock-route investigations, depot telephony refreshes.
The Hume corridor and the coastal councils
Sixty-one deliveries down the Hume corridor and along the NSW coastal councils.
Sixty-one deliveries around the Hume Highway and the municipal belt south and west of Sydney, including the small cities of Bowral, Berrima, Shellharbour, Kiama and Wollongong. The ICT layer from 2016 now ships inside engineering deliverables: condition data arrives structured, versioned and ready for the client's systems.
Hume Highway programme
Hume Highway corridor, NSW-ACT-VICClient & task
The Hume Highway corridor between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
Corridor HFTRS products and structure surveys, staged epochs reconciled in PostGIS, feeding maintenance and upgrade programmes.
Complexities we solved
- Corridor length made epoch consistency critical: acquisition was staged to hold one reference frame, epoch joins checked against GNSS control at every stage break.
Result
One reference frame across the programme; maintenance teams planning from PostGIS-served measured data.
Southern Highlands council infrastructure (Bowral, Berrima)
Bowral and Berrima, Southern Highlands, NSWClient & task
Southern Highlands councils with heritage-sensitive streetscapes.
Roads, drainage and public-asset inventories with heritage-conscious extraction, served through a web GIS portal.
Complexities we solved
- Heritage streetscapes punish heavy equipment: acquisition was planned to protect fabric, extraction tolerances tightened at heritage kerbs.
Result
Inventories delivered through the portal without a single streetscape complaint.
Illawarra coastal councils (Shellharbour, Kiama, Wollongong)
Shellharbour, Kiama and Wollongong, NSWClient & task
Coastal councils with roads, drainage and salt-exposed assets.
Condition programmes across roads, drainage and coastal structures, graded by exposure class.
Complexities we solved
- Salt exposure changes defect signatures: condition grading accounted for coastal corrosion classes, classifiers weighted per structure age and exposure.
Result
Coastal asset registers in PostGIS feeding works planning across all three councils.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2017: Canberra drainage studies, crown-land investigations, flood-passage reviews and municipal ICT extensions.
The year telephony and ICT entered the practice
Fifty-four Australian deliveries. This is the year telephony and ICT joined the practice.
Fifty-four deliveries as the Australian practice takes shape around Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, deliberately inland: no Western Australia, no Central Australia. Two threads define 2016. Telephony enters the delivery record: municipal communications and ICT integration become a deliverable alongside survey and asset work. And every engineering product now carries a deeper information-and-communications layer: data models, delivery pipelines and reporting interfaces layered on the datasets.
Victorian transportation data programmes
VictoriaClient & task
Victorian transport programmes needing consistent corridor and network data.
Corridor and network data delivery into PostGIS against Victorian specifications.
Complexities we solved
- Specification dialects differ from the Canadian practice the team grew up in: acceptance criteria were mapped line by line, then encoded as automated ETL validation rules before mobilisation.
Result
Deliveries accepted at first pass, validated by automated ETL rules.
Council condition programmes, greater Melbourne
Greater Melbourne, VictoriaClient & task
Councils needing road, footpath and kerb condition under budget scrutiny.
Condition baselines and defect registers loaded to PostGIS, ready for asset-plan sign-off.
Complexities we solved
- Footpath and kerb assets are small, numerous and litigation-sensitive: extraction contracts specified tolerance per asset class, automated QA sampling run on every load.
Result
Asset plans signed off on measured baselines in the council web GIS.
Municipal telephony and ICT integration
Adelaide, South AustraliaClient & task
Councils whose depots and halls ran voice and data as disconnected silos.
Telephony and ICT integration for municipal sites: structured cabling, SIP-ready VoIP networks and unified directories across depots, halls and works yards.
Complexities we solved
- Legacy copper and modern IP had to coexist for months: a phased SIP cutover with per-site fallback kept every depot reachable, every extension validated before the old line was dropped.
Result
Consolidated SIP-based communications adopted council-wide; the first telephony line in the studio's delivery record.
Canopy and vegetation spectral mapping
Greater Melbourne, VictoriaClient & task
Councils managing canopy targets and species compliance.
Species and canopy mapping from the studio spectral library by supervised classification.
Complexities we solved
- Species with near-identical visual signatures separated only in UV bands: lab library codes trained the classifier, separability re-tested on held-out field plots before release.
Result
Canopy and species layers published to the council web GIS, adopted into planning.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2016: Sydney corridor data programmes, drainage condition, playground and furniture inventories, the first ICT asset registers.
Coast-to-coast Canada, and Australia
Forty-seven deliveries from Saskatchewan to Ontario. In September, the practice moved to Australia.
Forty-seven deliveries: the major cities of Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Ontario, mostly within 100 to 150 km of the provincial capitals, plus the first Australian chapter in September, around Adelaide within roughly 200 km, including several controlled-access government estates. Technology development for civil, municipal and industrial construction and surveying remains the core of the year.
Steel plant asset investigation, Hamilton
Hamilton, OntarioClient & task
An operating steel plant where investigations had to run around production schedules.
HFTRS acquisition inside the plant: cranes, rail spurs, buildings and process infrastructure measured, classified by the fusion pipeline and reported per segment for the upgrade programme.
Complexities we solved
- Dust and heat degraded optical returns: windows and sensor settings were tuned per bay, calibration re-verified against RTK control points each shift.
- Access was negotiated shift by shift: acquisition ran to the production calendar, classification and certification deferred to the overnight batch pipeline.
Result
Classified asset registers and reporting that fed the plant upgrade programme directly.
Site infrastructure reporting and upgrades, Hamilton
Hamilton, OntarioClient & task
Hamilton's largest private employer, requiring infrastructure investigation reporting ahead of upgrade works.
Investigation reporting and upgrade surveys across site infrastructure: rails, building frames, services and drainage, registered to as-built geometry.
Complexities we solved
- Electromagnetic environment around operating cranes disturbed some sensors: plans were re-sequenced around EMI sources, the fusion pipeline flagging degraded epochs.
- Every finding had to be located on drawings from multiple decades: registration to as-built geometry preceded defect mapping, each defect carrying drawing and point-cloud references.
Result
Upgrade works prioritised on located, measured evidence.
Highway 401 corridor programme
Highway 401, OntarioClient & task
One of North America's busiest highways, surveyed under live traffic.
HFTRS corridor products under live traffic: geometry, structures and furniture locked to chainage and certified per segment for design and asset teams.
Complexities we solved
- Median and shoulder windows were minutes long: aerial acquisition sorties were timed to traffic gaps, each pass validated against RTK control on exit.
Result
Chainage-locked corridor layers accepted for design without lane closures or mobile traffic control.
Controlled-estate geospatial programmes
Adelaide, South AustraliaClient & task
Security-controlled government estates in South Australia.
HFTRS acquisition fused with satellite imagery for context, delivering geospatial products inside escort and clearance regimes to client documentation standards.
Complexities we solved
- Access was escorted and windows short: sorties were rehearsed against security constraints, RTK base placements pre-cleared before mobilisation.
- Raw data could not leave the estate: pipelines were built to publish curated, downsampled products only, every export logged.
Result
Products accepted inside the security regime; the programme extended into subsequent years on the same curated-export pipeline.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2015: Highways 406 and 407, microsimulation models for Mississauga, Toronto, Oakville, Brampton and Oshawa, GTA council condition baselines, range clearance surveys, spectral signature trials, and the first Australian entity paperwork.
Municipal programmes and the water years
Municipal programmes and water infrastructure, thirty-eight deliveries, and the first work in British Columbia.
Thirty-eight deliveries across Alberta and British Columbia, weighted to municipal programmes, hydrogeology, drinking-water treatment and wastewater treatment. The era's digital move: treatment plants and collection networks that lived on paper and in memory became measurable registries and models.
Drinking-water treatment plant upgrade baselines
British ColumbiaClient & task
A BC drinking-water treatment plant preparing an upgrade programme with paper process records.
Structural condition, process telemetry baselines and asset registers compiled into the SQL registry for the upgrade business case.
Complexities we solved
- Instrument loops from three decades carried undocumented changes: double-entry digitisation with scripted continuity checks preceded any analytics.
Result
Upgrade scope agreed on measured condition held in one registry.
Hydrogeology and wellhead protection studies
AlbertaClient & task
Municipal well fields needing capture-zone and vulnerability evidence for provincial approvals.
Hydrogeology studies fusing lidar terrain, surficial geology and monitoring data into capture-zone models computed from the geodatabase.
Complexities we solved
- Flat terrain hid recharge pathways: field conductivity runs were fused with the lidar terrain model in Python to disambiguate flow where vertical relief could not.
Result
Protection zones approved on defensible modelled evidence with traceable terrain lineage.
Wastewater collection network condition
Alberta and British ColumbiaClient & task
Collection networks whose CCTV condition media lived on tape, keyed to manhole references alone.
Reconcile CCTV condition media to a georeferenced network model in the SQL geodatabase, with defect grading per reach.
Complexities we solved
- CCTV references and GIS reaches disagreed on manhole identity: a scripted reconciliation pass keyed on invert depths restored the join and logged every override.
Result
A condition-ranked collection model, queryable by defect class, adopted for rehabilitation planning.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2014: Municipal road condition programmes, storm-pond capacity surveys, well-field telemetry pilots across both provinces.
Twenty-nine deliveries across Alberta
Twenty-nine deliveries across Alberta, from municipal corridors to transportation assets and parks investigations.
All twenty-nine projects of 2013 sit in the founding geography: Edmonton, Calgary, Banff and Jasper. The year made the digital baseline a product in its own right: one fused acquisition epoch per corridor or town, asset registries with location and condition per record, accepted by municipal and parks engineers as the single reference.
Calgary municipal corridor programme
Calgary, AlbertaClient & task
Calgary districts requiring consolidated road and drainage baselines ahead of capital planning.
Fused HFTRS acquisition and per-district extraction: carriageways, lanes, drainage structures and public assets loaded into one georeferenced SQL registry.
Complexities we solved
- District crews used three different asset conventions: crosswalk tables normalised attributes at ingestion without losing source detail, every record keeping source lineage.
Result
One queryable registry per district, adopted into the capital planning cycle.
Parkway corridor condition programme
Banff and Jasper national parks, AlbertaClient & task
Mountain parkways where closure windows are short and terrain exposure is constant.
Corridor condition baselines from mobile fused acquisition locked to chainage, with hazard registers for cut slopes and drainage.
Complexities we solved
- Rockfall zones constrained stop times: acquisition ran at extended standoff with lidar carrying the slope face, sections cut automatically per chainage interval.
Result
Chainage-locked condition and hazard baselines accepted by parks engineering without a single closure overrun.
Industrial yards and rail spurs inventories
Edmonton, AlbertaClient & task
Edmonton industrial yards with asset records spread across drawings and memory.
Yard inventories from fused acquisition: rail spurs, pavements, fencing, lighting and drainage reconciled to site plans in the geodatabase.
Complexities we solved
- Rail geometry under crane loads deviated from plan geometry: as-measured geometry, fitted from the fused point cloud, became the registry reference.
Result
Registries accepted as the yards' first single, queryable digital reference.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2013: Jasper utilities mapping, Calgary floodplain reviews, reserve-road condition work and the first aerial photography campaigns.
Proving the method at network scale
The one-pass survey method proved itself on full road networks: eighteen deliveries in a single season.
Eighteen deliveries in the second year turned a clever one-pass method into a production system able to hold network-scale programmes.
Provincial highway HFTRS programme
Provincial highways, AlbertaClient & task
Provincial highway corridors requiring repeatable, chainage-locked survey products.
Deliver fused lidar-photogrammetry products locked to chainage for multiple provincial highways, acceptance certified per segment by automated residual checks.
Complexities we solved
- Curve radius and cant broke naive centrelines: per-chord fitting with cant compensation in the C++ core replaced global splines, chainage held to RTK control.
Result
Chainage-locked corridor layers, certified per segment, adopted as the provincial reference for the programme.
Municipal infrastructure baselines
Satellite towns around Edmonton, AlbertaClient & task
Satellite towns around Edmonton standing up their first digital infrastructure records.
Roads, drainage and public-asset baselines extracted from one HFTRS epoch per town into a shared SQL schema.
Complexities we solved
- Each town kept records in its own convention: extraction contracts ran per town against one fused base, attribute crosswalks written once in SQL and reused.
Result
Per-town baselines in one geodatabase from a single acquisition, at a fraction of separate-survey cost.
Drainage and hydrology studies from lidar DEMs
AlbertaClient & task
Engineering consultants needing catchment and flow-path inputs for drainage design.
Breakline-enforced DEM production and flow-path analytics from fused corridor data held in the SQL geodatabase.
Complexities we solved
- Raw DEMs misled flow paths across culverts: culvert structures were enforced as breaklines from the imagery channel before any hydrology ran in Python.
Result
Drainage studies accepted without a single re-survey; DEMs carried auditable lineage.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2012: Reserve-road programmes, gravel-road condition work and the first aerial photography campaigns.
The founding year
Six projects in the founding year, and every one of them delivered as georeferenced data.
Epcotec starts in Edmonton. Six projects in the founding year, and the founding HFTRS method (lidar and photogrammetry fused in one pass, sub-5-millimetre point accuracy) goes straight to work on civil, transportation and municipal infrastructure surveys, including remote-sensing investigations in the Rocky Mountains parks. Digital from day one: every deliverable is a georeferenced dataset.
First municipal corridor survey, Edmonton
Edmonton, AlbertaClient & task
City of Edmonton arterial network, resurveyed ahead of a capital works programme.
Prove the fused HFTRS acquisition at city scale: lidar and photogrammetry fused in one pass by the in-house C++/Python pipeline, accepted per 100 m segment against GNSS RTK control.
Complexities we solved
- Photogrammetry failed over low-texture fresh asphalt: the C++ fusion core let lidar ranges carry the solution where image matching collapsed.
- Acceptance was per segment, not per dataset: a per-segment certification algorithm tested each 100 m block against RTK residuals and signed accuracy on the fly.
Result
Sub-5-millimetre certified accuracy across the arterial network, certificates machine-signed per segment; the method became the studio standard on day one.
Transportation asset condition baseline
Alberta highway networkClient & task
An Alberta transportation contractor with no digital condition record for its maintained roads.
Fuse IRI and rutting profiles with located imagery into a per-segment condition baseline in the SQL geodatabase, ready for maintenance planning.
Complexities we solved
- Condition data arrived in referencing dialects that diverged from the network: a Python normaliser with an exception queue keyed every profile to chainage before any analytics ran.
Result
A defensible, chainage-locked condition baseline adopted for the maintenance planning cycle.
Rocky Mountains parks investigations (Jasper and Banff)
Jasper and Banff national parks, AlbertaClient & task
National parks and reserves where ground crews are constrained and terrain is unforgiving.
Terrestrial remote-sensing investigations of access corridors, terrain hazards and infrastructure footprints inside Jasper and Banff national parks, registered to GNSS RTK control in one pass.
Complexities we solved
- Dense canopy defeated photogrammetric ground capture: lidar ground returns carried the terrain model, ground points classified per return structure in Python.
- Field windows were bounded by wildlife and visitor seasons: sorties were planned to ecological calendars and network RTK coverage maps alongside the weather.
Result
Georeferenced hazard and corridor registers delivered without a single off-season intrusion.
ALSO DELIVERED IN 2011: Calgary drainage studies, utility as-builts, small cadastral jobs and the first subcontracts that kept the bench full.
Your engagement, next in the record.
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