Practical Solutions

Pavement & Street Management

Requirement:
Design a system to synchronise road and pavement works to minimise disruption and to avoid duplication of cost.

Solution:
Coordinating multiple agency pavement activity is a holy grail for government and utility managers. The scope to save costs by harmonising multiple agency urban work is very large. Street digs and disruption, for example, could be minimised.

We can organise provision of limited-data-set, special purpose information, (eg. street maps and utilities only), for people like field crews, either via internet or WAP connections. This allows a telco street crew supervisor to do a field check on, say, maps of power lines under the street, before they start digging.

Or, imagine a builder being able to check on the web the exact and current location of sewage, gas and electricity lines before digging - all via the one web page. That alone would save thousands of hours of work for everyone from home owners to the construction industry.

Our technology simultaneously allows administrator level packaged displays of information to allow high level planning and coordination. If we're able to collect task planning information from participating agencies we can provide, for example, a cross-agency view of proposed or needed street digging, and a mechanism for agencies to try and coordinate their activities.

We enable appropriate, stored, source data to be published to the web using open standards. We work with what's currently stored electronically, both geo-spatial data such as electricity line locator maps, water and sewage mains maps, property boundaries or telco line maps, to text collections that might have geo-spatial references in them, such as building applications or a database of road crew job logs.

We are basically cross-platform and software-neutral: we can take data from pretty much anywhere. The key thing is finding something in the data that can provide a geo-spatial reference. The distributed data model means live pull-in of data over the internet; we don't have to collect it on one server. The real time nature of our technology will be of immense value to planning and managemnet of the urban environment.

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