Engineering GIS and APWA

Last week I attended a fascinating conference in Los Angeles, the annual APWA (American Public Works Association) Southern California Conference.  Most of the people attending were water and waste water management professionals, primarily from Los Angeles and Southern California. 

Aging Field Force

I gave a presentation on open source geospatial and its impact on infrastructure management with a particular focus on the impact on field force automation.  My take was that Southern California public works departments are experiencing the same fundamental problem that utilities and telcos across North America are, an aging work force and the lack of an effective business process for capturing the knowledge about the network infrastructure that is currently in the heads of experienced (and soon to retire) field staff.   For example, I chatted with an employee of an Arizona utility recently, who told me that in his organization 50% of the work force is eligible for retirement this year.  To me the problem can be addressed by enfranchising the field force, making it possible for them to feedback information from the field to a central data repository.  The process most organizations feel most comfortable with is redline, which is a two step process, where field staff annotate drawings and Records staff are responsible for updating the central repository.  But increasingly, with the advent of ubiquitous WiFi, 2.5G/3G telephony and handhelds, organizations are seriously contemplating providing direct update access to the central data repository to their field staff.

CAD/GIS Integration

One of the talks I attended was by Diane Ray of RBF Consulting on "The interoperability of GIS and AutoCAD Map."  Diane talked about another common problem, making the same data available to engineers and GIS professionals, and how RBF addressed this problem for the Beamont Cherry Valley Water District.  Beaumont Cherry is interesting in that it requires that contractors provide submittals documents in both CAD and GIS formats.  For contractors who are unable to do the conversion themselves, BCVWD charges about $275 per lot to convert a CAD drawing to GIS format.  The conversion process is not a simple format conversion process, but involves exploding blocks, ensuring topological consistency such as ensuring nodes and line endpoints are snapped, converting lines to polylines, and making attribute and other property data available in MS Access files.  None of this is really that complex and in fact CAD operators can use many of the features already available in modern CAD tools, such as classification in AutoCAD and Autodesk Map, to address these issues during the engineering design phase.  Some of the problems require in addition fairly simple application development to enforce.  But in my opinion the best way to deal with most of these issues are through using a rule-based constraint engine such is found in Autodesk Topobase to enforce attribute, relationship and other constraints.