ArcGIS Applications for Community Construction Notification Process
University Growth Trajectory
The UC San Diego La Jolla campus is roughly the size of a small city; at approximately 1,158 acres, currently 63,400 enrolled students, full-time equivalent staff and faculty of approximately occupy campus on any given day. Patients and visitors are regularly part of the campus population as they navigate to healthcare facilities, athletic events, and performance venues.
Growth has been a staple on campus over the last decade as the state and university prioritize expanding access to students seeking a high-quality education. Between Fall 2016 and Fall 2023, about 3.4M square feet of new facilities were built, including almost 9,000 new beds in campus housing, with an additional 4.3M SF under construction. See the UC San Diego Strategic Plan.
The increase in students and new construction is projected to continue, with an estimated total headcount of 56,000 enrolled students and 40,300 full-time-equivalent employees through the year 2040. More than 18,000 new beds are planned to be constructed over the next 15 years, with a goal of housing 65% of enrolled students. In addition, construction of new or redeveloped research, healthcare, academic, support facilities, and utility and infrastructure upgrades are planned to support student growth.
In this article you will learn how UC San Diego leveraged ArcGIS and location intelligence to address the challenges of campus growth management and replacement of disconnected legacy systems and workflows.
Keeping the Public Informed Concerning Construction Impacts
New projects require sending all-campus alert notifications before construction fences are erected to illustrate mobility impacts to the community. The alert process is initiated by the assigned project manager, with a narrative and map provided for description and context of the area impacted. Departmental subject matter reviewers and executives are prompted to evaluate the narrative and graphics, and once approved, alert items are forwarded to the Records department for campus-wide distribution.
Prior to the new workflow, a static map was conscripted simultaneously with the narrative, oftentimes in collaboration with Campus Planning, or contracted consultants. Teams used the “mapping” environment within which they were most familiar. Whether that was Google, the current campus map, Concept 3D, or GIS campus base layers. Graphics were further adjusted in Snip, Adobe, Paint, or Powerpoint. The alert narrative and graphic were then sent to the reviewers, via email chains, to track all review comments/approvals.
The examples below, of alert graphics used over the past couple of years, lack consistency across basemaps and other fundamental standard mapping practices. Call out boxes are prevalent and detract from the graphic rather than enhance. Legends and title blocks are not used, or inconsistently so, as is color. Oftentimes, the narrative and the map elements did not correlate to each other.
Receivers of this information expressed frustration that the disparate visualizations didn't provide sufficient context to facilitate understanding the impacts to their drive or walk across campus. As an internal construction alert reviewer, the GIS manager was all too aware of the clunky review workflow and inconsistency of map graphics.
GIS Applications for Marketing
GIS, as an official department, has existed since May 2023, and resource shortages prevented active pursuit toward a dynamic geospatial alert application. Funding for consultant assistance was obtained after leadership prioritized the project as a highly visible and targeted opportunity to demonstrate the simplicity of GIS applications and interactive visualizations.
The GIS team along with an external consultant, facilitated the first phase of the construction alert process improvement project. Training users in GIS applications and process workflows, developing and supporting geospatial data layers and creating necessary ArcGIS Enterprise applications for editing, review, and public access.
Project managers with Capital Program Management and Facilities Management can now directly add, edit, and delete construction alert features in the Experience Builder application. This streamlines the process, reducing clumsy back-and-forth interactions between functional and technical teams.
Symbology and cartography are standardized and do not need to be reinvented each alert. Fence boundaries, impacts/detours, and road closures are now represented by intuitive icons or distinct lines and polygons. Layer record values are utilized to symbolize and filter data across various map views within different applications.
GIS Applications Utilized
All PMs/ have access to edit features in an edit or review state. The GIS Edit Application is built in ArcGIS Experience Builder.
Operations Maintenance and Capital Program reviewers now have access to a GIS Review application, developed within ArcGIS Dashboards. Only editors and internal reviewers have access to this view only application. The URL provided filters and zooms to specifically target each separate project alert area.
The UC San Diego community and the public now have access to a consistent, real-time, and searchable platform for viewing alerts. Specific alert areas can be accessed via application alert URLs, while the University community will have access to filter all date-dependent project layers.
A Summary of Project Management
Beyond the practical product considerations, building internal cross-functional team relationships has been critical to the success of this review workflow modification and GIS tool adoption. Evolving the team to include members with a broad array of experiences and technical skills has enhanced the processes and tools created. Team members' assistance in establishing requirements, product support and testing, and training relevant staff has proved invaluable.
Project communications have mostly been managed through email and weekly team meetings. While these decentralized methods have been effective, our team is also working to incorporate new project management tools and workflows, such as Jira and Confluence, to centralize documentation, clarify communications, and streamline our task actions.
This project has taught staff that there is a balancing act between releasing incrementally vs building to perfection. Taking a more agile approach to this project has resulted in higher flexibility, allowing stakeholders to adapt to changing project requirements, and continually evaluating and refining the GIS system to ensure maximum return on investment.
The cross-functional team is composed of members of the following four departments: Capital Program Management, Facilities Management, Campus Planning, and GIS. The Campus Planning team members are alert reviewers and, in many cases in the past, had created graphics for campus alerts.
GIS Improvements Prompted the Adoption of Trimble Unity Connect as a Workflow Tool
Initiated as a GIS solution, the construction alert improvement project team quickly adopted coordination with Trimble Unity Connect (formerly e-Builder) as a critical path during requirements gathering. Capital Program Management and Facilities Management Project Managers utilize Unity Connect to manage the scope, budget, time, communications, and file management of each UC San Diego construction projects.
After the departments launched the alert process module within Unity Connect an integration with GIS was able to take place. Data integration has improved the interactive experience for editors and reviewers. Project attributes are being pushed to a Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) location where the report is picked up by GIS. The GIS consultant developed a Modelbuilder process to create project specific domains when creating features.
Editors return to Unity Connect to add GIS application links that are used for review and public views.
Constraints and Considerations for the Future
The current version of ArcGIS Enterprise being utilized is 11.3 and while developing, the team encountered some ArcGIS Experience Builder parity issues (between other versions of ArcGIS Experience Builder and ArcGIS Web App Builder). The ability to filter and zoom to a specific alert was unavailable; in order to perform this step, our team transitioned the review and public applications to ArcGIS Dashboards.
There have also been headaches with the creation of the domain tables; processing has been taking an inordinate amount of time, and the decision was made recently to transition the Modelbuilder to Python, which has improved performance. Yet, the number of times this operation runs, every 15 minutes, is having an effect on the availability to edit features.
The workflow that allowed built features to inherit the project number from a polygon of the construction area extent, was abandoned. There were multiple overlapping project extents which were creating unexpected attribute results. Instead, the editors must select the project ID from the domain list for each feature.
In the immediate future, there are four items that our team will be implementing to improve the process and tools:
- The realization was made to separate out the approved alerts process from the development of domains for editing. This way the approved workflow bypasses any performance hiccups based on running the domains Python script.
- Facilitate Capital Program Management and Facilities business processes by providing access to external consultants to build features for specific alert processes. ITS manages user identity access and ArcGIS Enterprise is behind SSO and dual authentication. It would be necessary to extend an advanced ArcGIS license to identified consultants, based on the University of California agreement negotiated with Esri.
- Understand how further ArcGIS Enterprise upgrades may provide access to new and improved tools that will alleviate work-around decisions made to alleviate technical and performance
- Create direct integration between Trimble Unity Connect and GIS. Currently, the SFTP push/pull process can take up to 10 minutes, which could negatively affect momentum for PM engagement with, and adoption of, the editor tool.
Other items that will be considered based on feasibility and business owner requirements:
- Provide the ability for reviewers to sketch edits directly within the application. ArcGIS advanced licenses would need to be distributed to reviewers.
- Include webhooks to send notifications to PMs once reviewers complete their comments (should sketch tool from prior bullet be built).
- Develop ArcGIS Field Maps app for mobile field survey to edit alert features in the field.
- Aggregate district, PM, or consultant statistics in a Dashboard for quick consumption by internal business users.
- Incorporate other, internal, construction notification processes into alert tool. Reuse construction layers to reduce the creation of feature redundancies.
- Move all GIS workloads to the cloud for ease of management.
Conclusions
GIS is a new and developing program on campus and it has been imperative that the team showcases GIS projects to market the capabilities and critical functions it provides. At the heart of the program, there is a drive to provide services and accurate data in a standard manner to constituents: improving efficiency, reducing errors, and enhancing decision-making capabilities.
This project has demonstrated the power of separating form and function, by providing easy-to-learn editing tools in a geospatially enabled database. Leveraging GIS has improved data consistency and is moving toward providing the university community with a single system of record for visual data on this dynamically changing campus.
Basemap and cartographic standardization ensures there is clarity and cohesion in campus messaging. The streamlined workflow accelerates the speed at which the alert elements are built, placing materials in reviewers’ and the public’s hands in a timely and dependable manner.
Overall, the process has proved to save time internally by reducing lengthy, and sometimes confusing, back and forth between PMs and technical graphic staff. Campus Planning staff have been able to recoup time to perform other planning tasks and money is saved by reducing the need for outside consulting.
The GIS team will continue to monitor and evaluate these applications and the overall system's performance and identify areas for improvement. Refining and optimizing elements based on user feedback and evolving project requirements.