GIS Based Utility Pole Maintenance System.

Abstract

GIS has come a long way in many parts of the world where information and data access on various utilities and components has been made readily available for purposes of management and decision making. With further advancements in technology GIS has witnessed tremendous leaps and bounds in associated technologies encompassing the field, Desktop, Online and Server environments that have been well inter-linked to provide ecosystems of functional management tools in various sectors.

In the Electricity sector, electric utility poles are a major component of the assets as they play a role of hoisting overhead power lines and assets including transformers, switchgears. This cements the sensitiveness of having to possess intelligence of their condition and state at any one given time to a high degree of detail. The current utility pole management procedures based simple paper notes done in the field and typed to summary excel documents which as observed all manual less reliable and susceptible to errors and omissions. This exposes the weakness of lack of proper intelligence of the various attributes of each pole which cannot be only limited to the location of the said utility pole. This project set out to come up with a solution that makes use a model GIS system involving the key GIS system components of Desktop, Mobile and Online resources to adequately provide a mechanism of up-to-date real-time information access and sharing across UEDCL or any other electric Utility company in an interactive environment catered for high level managers as well as Desk and Field workers to satisfy the urgent need to adopt and further leverage different functionalities of GIS and geodatabases to allow proper management of utility poles on the network and boost intelligence and decision making when performing maintenance tasks. The system is built on the Esri ArcGIS system with ArcGIS for Desktop, Server and ArcPad applications used comprising of an enterprise capable SDE Geodatabases using various Geodatabase functionalities enforce data quality and control as well as a Web Mapping Application to allow non-GIS staff to access the Geodata and interactively extract and post limited data updates. This all round system further proves the applicability of GIS in the energy utility sector with capability of incorporating other components of a electric network.