Underground Asset Abandon Tools For Utility Network

EdwardBlair

Hi -

I'm looking for tips/direction for tools provided with the Utility Network to help support the process of abandoning underground assets. Working in gas distribution at the moment, but tools for water distribution would probably be similar.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thx,

Ed

MikeMillerGIS

We prototyped an Attribute Rule that would move copy/move features to an abandon layer. You can try it out and see if it meets your needs.

There is a GP tool in this toolbox to set up the attribute rules.

https://esri.github.io/arcade-expressions/docs/3.3/AbandonRows.html

https://github.com/Esri/arcade-expressions/tree/master/attribute-rules/attribute_assistant

EdwardBlair

Thanks Mike! I'll take a look

EdwardBlair

Hi Mike -

This looks promising. Thanks. But I also need to ask a background question,

We're early in our design process and trying to decide to keep abandoned equipment in separate, non-networked classes (as they are in our current 10.8 implementation) or include them in the UN class with a lifecyclestatus of 'Abandoned'. In 10.8 it was just safer to keep abandoned assets completely outside the network so that there would be no way they could be inadvertently included in operations intended to be performed on 'In Service' assets. Is this pretty much the same rationale behind the tools you built?

Ed

MikeMillerGIS

Yes, that is the reason. Couple issues we have seen with them in the UN

- Visualization: Many times, we want to see abandon assets separately. This has lead to duplicating the UN layers with def queries to remove/show abandon features. This is not a good practice and can cause issues with the UN tools.

- Errors: abandoned features in the UN can still generate errors.

- Offset/Snapping: the abandoned features still participate in the topo. So if you replace a pipe, but want to keep the old pipe, you need to move its Z so it does not conflict with the new pipe.

EdwardBlair

Thank you! Very helpful!