Transforming the accuracy and precision of on-site data capture and transmission

Author:AMT-Sybex，Capita Plc的一部分

Britain’s gas network is the oldest in the world, dating back to the early 1800s, and although its gas mains have been upgraded over time, many thousands of miles of pipelines are still made from cast iron and other ductile metals. Over time, these pipes degrade and may eventually fracture, leading to gas leaks that impact the environment, reduce efficiency, increase costs, and can pose a danger to people and buildings.

威尔士和西公用事业公司以前是国家电网的一部分之后，于2005年建立为独立网络35,000公里的天然气分销管道将天然气运输到250万户房屋以及威尔士和英格兰西南部的企业。该公司的首要任务是通过汽油连接和可以依靠的天然气供应以及他们可以信任的服务水平来确保其750万客户的安全和温暖。

威尔士&西方实用程序替换旧金属气体mains with new, long-lasting plastic ones across Wales and the southwest of England, it wants to be sure that those new pipes are easy to find and maintain in the future.

随着升级管道的升级，该公司还希望升级其数据，并对资产所在的位置进行更准确的了解。威尔士和西部公用事业公司已与AMT-SYBEXand Leica Geosystems to build a new mobile solution that uses high-precision GNSS equipment to measure and map the exact coordinates of each new pipe as it is laid, as well as capturing important metadata about valves, junctions and other components. Capturing the information digitally has numerous benefits:

• 数字数据捕获节省了现场工程师和后台团队的时间
• High-precision GNSS increases the accuracy of asset data and reduces the risk of errors
• 资产数据可以在几秒钟内从现场传输到办公室，而不是几天
• 消除基于纸张的过程，降低成本并降低环境影响
• Future maintenance work should be safer and more efficient due to better location data.

将安全放在首位

Safety is a top priority for Wales & West Utilities. The company invests £1.4 million pounds a week in replacing all old metal gas pipes within 30 metres of buildings with new plastic ones – reducing leakage and improving safety.

Replacing these metal mains with more modern plastic pipes can significantly improve the security and reliability of the network, reducing the risk of leaks and the number of repairs required. For this reason, the Health and Safety Executive has advised all the gas distribution networks to accelerate the replacement of metal main, especially those that are within 30 m of a building.

Wales & West Utilities has taken this advice on board and is already nearly halfway through a 30-year replacement programme. On average, the company每年取代超过400公里的管道.

Beverley Robinson, data records manager at Wales & West Utilities, comments:“It’s a huge programme, and it’s very important for the business and for the regulator. In addition to capturing the information in the field my team is responsible for validating the data that comes in, keeping our asset repository up to date in our SAP ERP business systems, and producing reports for the regulator about our replacement programme progress.”

Part of the effort is to ensure that when the new pipework is laid, the company updates its asset data to keep track of how the pipes, valves and joints fit together, what they are made of, and where to find them. Recording the position of a pipe accurately may seem like a simple task, but it can create complex problems.

Problems with paper-based processes

威尔士和西公用事业的唱片官西蒙·巴雷特（Simon Barrett）解释说：“在过去,我们的测量工程师会啊ut on site with a paper map, a clipboard and a measuring wheel, and would draw the new pipes on the map with measurements relating to above-ground points of reference. For example, the pipe might run parallel to a road at a distance of 75 centimetres from the kerbstone.

“But what if a few years after we’ve laid the pipe, the road is widened and the kerb moved? Then our reference point is no longer accurate, and our crews could easily end up digging in the wrong place. Or what if we’re laying a pipe somewhere that doesn’t have any convenient reference points nearby, such as the middle of a field?”

After the initial data was captured, the downstream processes were also laborious. The engineers would scale up their field sketches and draw the new pipes on a larger map, which they would post to head office. Then the head office team would review the map and enter the data into the company’s central mapping system, Esri.

“We had to wait days for the latest information to arrive from the field, and processing the data was time-consuming for everyone,”adds Robinson.“我们还使用了大量纸，这是浪费且不切实际的。我们的测量工程师需要在任何条件下都能在户外工作，当下雨或大风时，处理纸质地图可能是一个大问题。”

寻找解决方案

威尔士和西部公用事业公司希望找到一种解决方案，该解决方案将承担从用户中找到资产的负担，并确切，明确的视图，以了解每个管道所在的位置。它还希望将整个工作流程数字化并减少每个阶段的手动努力。

“For a few years, our leakage teams have been using a mobile solution called Affinity Geofield from AMT-SYBEX, which gives them access to accurate mapping data while they’re working on-site - even if they’re in a remote area where they don’t have a mobile data connection,” says Barrett. “When we saw that Geofield could be used for drawing assets too, we saw its potential to help with some of our paperwork issues.”

To solve the other half of the problem, the company decided to useLeica Zeno, high-precision GNSS equipment from Leica Geosystems, to locate each pipe’s geographical coordinates to anaccuracy of centimetres. However, integrating the Zeno GNSS hardware with Geofield would be a first-of-its-kind project.

“最大的挑战之一是确保即使我们的测量工程师失去了数据连接，该系统仍然可以正常工作。”explains Barrett.“通常，该系统通过使用HXGN SmartNet实时运动学GNSS服务来工作。工程师持有一个接收器，该接收器从GNSS卫星的星座中获取位置数据。然后将这些读数与附近基站所做的读数进行了比较，后者的确切位置已经知道。通过比较两者，您可以纠正读数中的任何错误并达到难以置信的准确性。

“However, if you don’t have a mobile data connection to the base station, you can’t compare the readings, so you can’t do the correction. Since our engineers often work in remote areas where there’s little or no mobile phone signal, this was potentially a big problem.”

The project team solved this challenge by building a post-processing feature – if Geofield can’t find a mobile data connection, it will store all of the uncorrected readings from Zeno equipment locally until the connection is re-established. Once connectivity is restored, it can then process all of the readings in a batch, and provideaccurate, corrected geo-positioned data.