Tag Archives: Geoprocessing

As you may have seen, we released the Water Distribution Capital Improvement Planning (CIP) Template  a last week.  First, we wanted to say a big thank you to all of our users and business partners who helped us to refine the initial geoprocessing models and the toolset also shared their workflows for capital planning.   

We’ve already had a few questions about why we chose the term Capital Improvement Planning (CIP) to describe this template, since not all utilities use that term.  So when we use the term CIP, what we mean is the long term plans of a utility to manage their assets and/or to expand their system, what you may also call a “Capital Plan”, “Long Term Plan” or “5 year plan”.

Personally, I think the CIP Template is great example of how ESRI listens to our water utility customers and responds to their needs.  We’ve had numerous customers over the past few years tell us that they want to be able to leverage their asset data in GIS as well as their operational data (workorders, CIS, water quality) better to support their long term plans.  Of course, we thought that giving our customers a geographic view of all that asset and operational data was the best place for them to start.  We also heard from many of our water and wastewater customers that their long term planning has evolved from an occasional event to a continual process; because of funding issues, grant availability, coincidence with other projects that a utility could share costs with and the desire to be quick and proactive to eliminate the risk of future critical asset failures.

Also, we are excited, because the CIP template is great example of GeoDesign.  We’ll be doing a blog shortly that explores the principals of GeoDesign and relates them back to the CIP template.

2 Parts of the CIP Workflow

As we dug into the CIP process, we observed 2 distinct, but related workflows happening.  The first part of the workflow was to assemble data from many sources and analyze that data to look for where projects are needed.  This part of the process is tailor made for the benefits of GIS – to use GIS as the place where different types of data are assembled together into a common view and also to use the analytical capabilities of GIS to gain better insight into the aggregated data.  Because this analysis needs to be iterative (looking at multiple data layers with different weighted criteria), an auditable process (you have to be able to defend your findings to a PUC and your ratepayers) and an automated workflow (to save time, money and resources) this is a perfect match for Geoprocessing Models in ArcGIS.

GIS Analysis for CIP Decision Making

At first we took the approach that ESRI should try and build a few geoprocessing models that all water and wastewater utilities could use to score and rate their assets by estimated remaining asset life, condition or criticality.  We figured that we could do some research, interview some of our users and figure out these geoprocessing models (our inner geography geek begged us to take this approach first).  What we quickly realized was that there isn’t a silver bullet set of geoprocessing models we could build because every utility system has their own approach to long term asset management and their own priorities (KPIs, level of service they want to provide, hot button issues, fiscal condition, etc) that drive their long term planning. 

This was also a great reminder that even though we have the ability to use technology to automate a process, the human element is still critical, meaning that the more we talked with the engineers who are creating these CIP plans, the more we realized they need a better way to manipulate and process data so they could apply their engineering expertise to make decisions about capital projects.  We also noticed when talking to engineers doing capital planning, that while they were somewhat aware of the analytical capabilities of GIS, they weren’t aware of the geoprocessing framework core to ArcGIS and how to use ModelBuilder to automate analysis and create a reusable toolset. 

So we decided that we need to focus our CIP template on showing the water utility community how they could benefit from automating spatial analysis with the ArcGIS geoprocessing framework by providing some generic models.  So, please keep in mind that the intent of the models we’ve provided in the CIP template is to show you how geoprocessing and ModelBuilder work within ArcGIS so you can create geoprocessing models that reflect how your utility wants to manage assets and plan for the long term.  Incidentally, if you want to learn more about GIS analysis, Geoprocessing or Model Builder within ArcGIS, ESRI has lots of great resource including on-line training, books and class room instruction.

Estimating Project Costs

The second part of the CIP workflow we observed was estimating CIP project costs.  Basically this workflow was estimating the cost of a project based on either replacing existing infrastructure or adding new infrastructure (main extensions, interconnections, extending service to new sub-divisions, etc).  It’s important to note that all of the functionality in this part of the CIP process is core to ArcGIS and the geodatabase, all we’ve done is customized the application to automate and simplify this part of the workflow.  This is what we decided to call the Costing Estimating Tools.

The first step in estimating project costs is to create projects by grouping assets together into projects.  In this part of the process you are visualizing the data you brought into GIS and also the results of your analysis and then determining what assets you want to include in a project, your rehab or replacement strategy for those assets  and then saving that information.  So you are literally visualizing data in GIS (most likely working with many data layers of data, including the same feature datasets symbolized different ways) and doing some spatial and attribute queries to come up with candidate assets to include in CIP projects.

From there, assets that are in need of replacement or rehabilitation and spatially close to together are grouped in projects.  We’ve heard from many water utilities that without a spatial context it was a real challenge for them to group assets together into appropriate projects without and also it was a challenge for them to track and manage information about candidate assets for CIP projects throughout the CIP planning process.  Water utilities were struggling with supporting their CIP process with paper maps and tracking assets that were part of a project, including costs to replace those assets, in spreadsheets. 

So traditionally, this CIP process took a lot of staff time and also lead to uncertainty about whether utilities were actually spending their money on the most appropriate capital projects.  We also heard that utilities were struggling with how to update data when they tried to refine a large candidate list of CIP projects down to just a few to carry forward into design and that it was next to impossible to look at multiple scenarios for the same project area (assets grouping and rehab or replacement approach) because so much of this process was manual or spreadsheet driven.

We took the approach that if a utility has their assets (water distribution, wastewater collection or stormwater) in GIS, they should use their GIS asset data to group into CIP projects and then to store information about the CIP projects (like the extent and also all of the assets that are part of the project) as new data layers in GIS.  This enables a utility to create an authoritative source of data about their proposed capital projects in GIS.   So this drove us to create the Cost Estimating Tools. 

As we began to demonstrate early versions of the Cost Estimating Tools to our utility users, we got a lot of great feedback that helped us to refine the tools.  We were told that to be really useful, the tools should include the ability to either rehab or replace existing assets and to extend mains, so we programmed that functionality into the tools.  We also were told by our users that they needed to be able to compare the costs of different replacement strategies (open cut, trenchless, etc) for the same set of assets so we designed the tools to make it easy to compare the costs of use using different rehab methodologies.  Also we knew that the costing element of the tools needed to be flexible, because individual utilities favor different pipe materials which can be set as defaults and that unit costs are often specific to a utility and those can be easily configured in a simple table.

So what we wanted to do with this blog was to explain how we arrived at version 1 of the Water Distribution CIP Template.  We are very interested in your feedback so we can incorporate more useful changes in version 2.  Also we’d like to hear about any geoprocessing models that you would like to use for CIP planning.  So, please leave us feedback here – http://forums.esri.com/forums.asp?c=55&s=426#426

In the next few weeks we’ll be recording a video of the Water Distributions CIP Template in action and we are also going to do a webcast in December that takes a deep dive into the CIP Template.