Latest Contributions by TomDeWitte

  By Tom DeWitte and Tom Coolidge Part 2 of 4 Our first blog of this series provided an overview of how ArcGIS can improve the efficiency of managing a gas organization’s leak survey compliance program. If you missed it, you can access it here. In this first part of this blog series we talk about the first five of ten top traits of modernized gas leak surveys. “You’re Late”. We all cringe when we hear these words.  I am sure there are many gas compliance managers who have nightmares about a regulator saying these words during a regulatory audit. Being on time or late is all about management of dates and times. For a Leak Survey program, the dates of importance are the “Next Inspection Date” and the “Next Compliance Date.” Managing these two dates would not be too difficult if all types of leak surveys used the same intervals across all types of pipe subsystems. But that is not how the regulations work. So, how can a gas organization, whether large or small, implement a leak survey data management solution that allows these numerous varieties of leak survey intervals to be easily and accurately applied across the numerous subsystems of a pipe network? And in doing so, give gas compliance managers the confidence they need to sleep well and avoid nightmares of being told they were late.  The answer is ArcGIS and attribute rules. 6 - Easy Management of Different Survey Intervals The first step is to have the leak survey record data organized and maintained in a manner that does not require programmers or IT Administrators to implement a new type of leak survey or a new inspection interval for an existing survey. Within ArcGIS, this is accomplished by using subtypes and subtypes specific default values within the Leak Survey Area featureclass. The Leak Survey Area featureclass is a polygon featureclass which stores all leak survey areas for a gas organization. This includes distribution business districts, distribution area surveys, distribution atmospheric surveys, cast iron surveys, as well as the different types of transmission and gathering leak surveys. Each type of leak survey is defined as a subtype within the leak survey featureclass. This allows each type of leak survey to have unique default values and coded value domains. This configuration of the leak survey data allows each unique type of leak survey to have its own next inspection date and next compliance date intervals.  Should these intervals ever change, a simple edit by the data owner of the leak survey data is all that is needed to implement the change. 7 - Consistent Calculations Consistently and accurately calculating the next inspection date and the next compliance date for a leak survey area when it is completed is mission critical to the leak survey program. Within ArcGIS, this can now be easily implemented with attribute rules.  Attribute rules are arcade scripts stored within the leak survey featureclass to bind a specific business rule behavior to the featureclass. In this case it is the calculation of the current completed inspection date with the inspection interval.                 COMPLETED DATE + INSPECTION INTERVAL = NEXT INSPECTION DATE Here is what the attribute rule with some documentation looks like for calculating the next compliance date. Because this attribute rule uses each leak survey area’s individual values for CompletedDate, NextComplianceDate, and ComplianceInterval, the script never needs to be modified when the regulations change.  Only the subtype and record data need to be modified.  Consistent Experience in Field and Office Using attribute rules to bind the calculation of the inspection dates to the leak survey feaureclass in the enterprise geodatabase assures a consistent experience in the office and the field.  Regardless of what desktop, web, or mobile application updates the leak survey record to a status of completed, the same calculation will be performed to update the inspection dates. Where can I get This Schema and Attribute Rules The ArcGIS for Leak Survey schema and attribute rules are provided as a free download on the Esri Community site (formerly called Geonet). You can directly download the zip file containing the scripts, schema, and installation instructions with this link. It’s an Automated Calculation Automating the management of a leak survey’s inspection dates is one of the streamlining configurations which can be implemented into your ArcGIS system. Putting these configurations into your ArcGIS system will go a long way into helping your gas compliance management from hearing the words: “you’re late”. We have now covered 7 of the top ten traits of a modernized leak survey. In the next blog we will look at how, with a minor adjustment to the organization of the Leak Survey History data, accessing, understanding, and managing a Leak Survey’s inspection history can be greatly improved. PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are our own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions.   ... View more

  Modernizing Gas Leak Survey – Part 1 By Tom DeWitte and Tom Coolidge The prospect of natural gas escaping containment within the pipe network it is to be flowing is one of those things that can keep a gas utility executive up at night – for good reason. Leaks are a safety issue with the potential to harm people, property, and the environment. Detecting leaks quickly is a key to restoring the integrity of the pipe network and returning operations to their usual safe and reliable state. For this reason, every natural gas pipe in the United States and Canada is required to be surveyed for leaks at regulator intervals. Accomplishing this requirement requires gas organization staff to traverse 2.6 million miles (4,184,000 kilometers) in the United States and 368,000 miles (592,000 kilometers) of pipe in Canada. Most of this pipe is inspected by staff who walk while carrying special equipment to detect leaking natural gas. Walking at a pace of 3 miles per hour would require 989,333 hours of walking to inspect all the natural gas pipes in both countries.  That works out to 123,667 working days walking for 8 hours each day. These numbers are crazy huge and require significant manpower and equipment to accomplish this required task. For a gas organization, this means consuming a non-trivial amount of scarce Operations and Maintenance (O&M) dollars.  Any improvement in improving the efficiency and speed at which an organization can accomplish this required task can quickly add-up to significant savings of O&M dollars. And, importantly, contribute to a safety track record that aids the organization’s customer satisfaction, regulatory compliance, reputation, and brand value. In this blog series, we will look at the top traits of a modern Leak Survey program. In this first part, we focus on improving efficiency and lowering O&M costs.  This will be followed by additional articles which will focus on improving auditability, IT administration, and data management. 1 - Keep Crews Moving Let’s start with a simple premise about the efficiency at which a field technician can perform a Leak Survey.  Anything that requires the field technician to cease movement (walking or driving) increases cost. For many gas organizations, the Leak Survey process is a paper and marker process. In the paper process the field technician uses a marker to highlight on the paper map of the pipe system, those pipe segments which were traversed. This means having to stop moving, pull out the marker, and then mark on the paper map the street or neighborhood of the pipe system just completed.  Have every technician repeat this small activity several times an hour over the workday, repeating every workday spent performing leak survey, and very quickly this small little delay adds up to considerable time and becomes a significant increase to the company’s budget. What if the technician had a mobile phone or tablet with the ArcGIS Field Maps app installed? Then with the ArcGIS Tracking capability that is now built into the ArcGIS Field Maps mobile application, the software could be documenting every few seconds the location, date/time, and username of the field technician. The technician no longer needs to stop to mark or denote what portion of the pipe system was just traversed.  Keeping the technician moving, improves efficiency and reduces costs. 2 – Be Smart When Using Smart Devices Today’s smart devices are amazing little computing devices.  With the ArcGIS Field Maps mobile application, these smart devices know who I am, where I am, and the local date and time.  This system knowledge when applied to Leak Survey improves the efficiency of the field technician. The recent enhancement of Attribute Rules to ArcGIS allows for this this information to be automatically written to the Leak Survey record.  Why ask the field technician to stop moving and spend time documenting what the ArcGIS Field Maps application on the smart device already knows? No longer does the field technician need to enter the date and time when they started the leak survey area.  The ArcGIS Field Maps application knows this time. When the user changes the leak survey status to: In Progress, the application automatically populates the start date and time to the leak survey record. Nor does the field technician need to enter the date and time when the leak survey area is completed. The application knows this time, which is when the user denotes the leak survey status as: Completed. The application also automatically documents to the leak survey record the username of the field technician when the survey status is completed. Being able to leverage the smarts of the smart device allows the field technician to keep moving, and complete the Leak Survey in less time. 3 - Avoid Duplication of Surveys A common frustration for many leak survey programs is when one technician surveys the same section of the pipe system that was recently surveyed by another technician. The core cause of this issue and the wasteful costs it incurs is an inability to share information across the team in real time. There is nothing more frustrating than finding out your team did the same task twice. ArcGIS Field Maps helps the team to avoid duplication of surveys by sharing the information collected by one field technician to all team members.  As soon as one technician marks the leak survey area as completed, every other team member will see their maps update with a newly color-coded map showing the leak survey area as completed.  This includes sharing in near real-time information about identified issues and identified gas leaks. As soon as one team member marks a gas meter as damaged or corroded, all team members will see that newly collected information. 4 - Streamline IT Data Administration Another cost that is often overlooked is the cost the IT department will incur maintaining this compliance information. Many legacy solutions required extensive effort and cost to prepare the information for the next Leak Survey interval. This may be the cost to print thousands of paper maps which will be used by the leak survey field technicians. It may also be the cost to prepare the data in a digital leak survey system. Applying the attribute rule capabilities of ArcGIS to this problem has nearly eliminated the need for prepping of the information. With the current capabilities of ArcGIS, the updating of the next inspection date and next compliance dates are performed immediately by the software when the leak survey area is designated as completed. No longer is this a post-processing task for IT to initiate and monitor. 5 - Improve Management of Leak Survey History A key part of minimizing the cost of IT administration of leak survey is the elimination of the need to archive the leak survey data for future regulatory audits. Gone are the days of the GIS or IT administrator working on New Year’s Eve to copy out the current year’s leak survey data and reset the leak survey areas in preparation for next year.   Now, a leak survey record is immediately archived to the Leak Survey History table as soon as the status is set to: Completed. Applying better management methods to the leak survey history, not only reduces administration costs, it also provides easier and more intuitive access to a leak survey’s history during a regulatory audit. Given the thousands of miles of natural gas pipe that individual gas organizations are required to survey, any improvement to the efficiency of the program can quickly add up to significant reduction of O&M costs. ArcGIS Field Maps on a smart device provides these efficiencies to keep the field technician moving. This blog article is the first of a series of four blogs articles explaining how recent enhancements to Esri’s ArcGIS system can be utilized to improve the Leak Survey process. In this Part 1, we’ve covered five of the top ten traits of modernized leak survey that the whole blog series will cover. Future blogs in this series will go into greater detail on how these enhancements to ArcGIS can be configured to achieve the described efficiencies. PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are our own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions. ... View more

ArcGIS for Leak Survey – Sample Schema and Attribute Rules This zip file contains a sample geodatabase schema for organizing Leak Survey records and arcade script-based attribute rules to automate the management of the leak survey information. Deployment instructions are included with the zip file. If you have questions or comments, please post them to this geonet community, so everyone can see and share the information. Thank you Tom DeWitte Esri Technical Lead – Natural Gas industry  ... View more

By Tom DeWitte and Tom Coolidge Maps are one of man’s oldest forms of communication. The oldest known map was created in 25,000 BCE on a mammoth tusk. That would be over 20,000 years before the Sumerians would start writing on clay tablets. This ancient map is thought to have been a hunting map to tell where to hunt and find food. If this map was not easily understood by our ancient ancestors, they would have starved and died. So, what makes a map easy to understand?  The answer then is the same answer for today; symbology. Symbology is a language independent way to communicate information on a map.  Good symbology can communicate vast amounts of information without a single word or letter. District Heating and District Cooling Maps Like our forebears back in the wholly mammoth days, District Heating and District Cooling organizations rely on maps to communicate. District Heating and District Cooling maps need to communicate vast amounts of information. To accomplish this, they require a rich set of symbols which can describe what pipe system components are installed where.  That is not easy, as even the simplest pipe system map will have dozens of unique fittings, devices, pipes, and assemblies.  To help the District Heating and District Cooling community address this challenge, Esri has recently released a set of symbols created specifically for this industry. Symbols for District Heating and District Cooling This set of industry symbols contains over 140 icon-based symbols. These include symbols for chillers, steam traps, expansion joints, heat exchangers and pipe anchors to name a few. Created to Match Data Model Asset List These symbols were created to complement the recently released District Heating and Cooling Data Model (DHC2020).  This data model was released in December 2020 and is a free download available on Geonet. Each symbol in the symbol set correlates to a unique type of asset defined in the data model. Created for Digital Maps These symbols were created with today’s digital maps in mind.  When you look at them you will notice that each symbol has a white background shape behind the icon.  This was done to improve the visualization of the icon by providing a high color contrast with the icon’s immediate background.  It also provides a larger touch screen surface area, to make it easier to select the asset on a mobile device such as a smart phone or tablet. Where can I get these Symbols The Esri District Heating and Cooling 2021 style file which contains these symbols is available as a free download. You can also access it from the Geonet Industry page for District Heating and Cooling. Our ancestors relied on symbols on those early mammoth tusk maps to communicate and understand where to find food.  Similarly today’s District Heating and District Cooling organizations rely on symbols to create maps to help field staff to find where specific components of the pipe network are located. Luckily today’s digital maps are available on your smart phone which fits nicely in your pocket.  The same cannot be said for our ancestors and their mammoth tusk based maps. PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are our own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions. ... View more

By Tom DeWitte and Tom Coolidge Rethinking the role of District Heating and Cooling in the future’s more climate-sensitive energy mix is leading many District Heating and Cooling organizations to rethink how they best conduct their business. As part of this rethinking, an effort is underway at many District Heating and District Cooling organizations to adopt new processes or update and improve existing processes.  Ultimately, this is to improve the efficiency of the operation and maintenance of the organization. A term that is often used to name this effort is Digital Transformation.  At the root of this Digital Transformation is the need to collect, manage, and disseminate information about the pipe network in a more efficient manner than possible with paper or CAD files. This is where Geographical Information Systems (GIS) often enters the conversation. But why?  What is it about GIS that makes it central to Digital Transformation? Digital Transformation with GIS Many of the processes a District Heating or District Cooling organization will target for improvement are associated around enabling organization staff to answer the question of “Where.”  -Where are the buried valves I need to inspect located? -Where is the pipe buried so I can mark its location to avoid excavation damage? -Where have leaks occurred? -Where are the customers who will be impacted by an outage event? -Where are potential new customers near the existing pipe network? These are a few of the everyday questions that processes have been constructed to help organization staff address.  These questions require an understanding of location of the assets as well as their position within the pipe network.  Being a technology that provides this capability is a part of the reason why GIS is part of the digital transformation solution.  The other part of the reason is its ability to be a singular system to provide asset management, mapping, mobile data collection, and analytical tools.  It is this quadruple capability that provides the efficiency District Heating and District Cooling organizations are looking to accomplish with their Digital Transformation initiatives.  Asset Management with GIS Most asset management solutions on the market today are simply an inventory of the assets deployed to the field and record keeping of the operation and maintenance activities performed on those assets. Today’s GIS systems offer all those capabilities, and more. The more is the inclusion of the spatial representation of the asset (valves, pipes, pumps, heat exchangers, etc). Current generation GIS systems add more value to asset management by leveraging the spatial representation of the assets to create a digital representation of how these assets work together as part of a pipe network. This topological understanding of the pipe network is what allows current generation GIS systems to model the flow of the thermal energy, flow of the water, and perform isolation traces for outage events. This ability transforms the traditional asset management solution into a tool for understanding how the pipe network operates. Mapping with GIS Mapping of pipe systems has literally been around as long as humans have been building pipe networks. Initially the mapping of the pipe system was a static snapshot preserved on linen, paper, vellum, and eventually CAD. These legacy systems would divide a pipe system into sheets or tiles. Each sheet or tile representing a portion of the pipe system. A modern GIS solution for District Heating and District Cooling provides a seamless interactive digital representation of the pipe network. One that allows office and mobile staff to interactively pan and zoom across the seamless display of the entire pipe network.  This information is transmitted live to the organization’s users, ensuring that the information being presented is always the most current. Mobile Data Collection with GIS Digital Transformation for many means replacing paper data capture with digital data capture tools. This is an easy-to-measure efficiency gain as it typically eliminates the office task of transposing the field completed paper forms into a digital repository. Modern GIS systems provide this capability as part of their solution. The best of class GIS systems can leverage mobile devices such as smartphones and digital tablets. These solutions leverage the smart devices native tools such as GPS and camera. This allows the field technician to see on an interactive map where they are located in reference to the buried pipe system, and to capture photos as part of the inspection record.             This digitally captured data streams back to the GIS data repository.  No office transposing or manipulation is required. Understanding the Pipe Network with GIS Digital Transformation also means enabling the pipe asset data to be natively utilized by engineers and planners for analysis.  Modern GIS systems and their understanding of location provide planners and engineers with tools to model: -how the pipe system transports energy, -how the pipe network can impact the adjacent community and environment, -how the adjacent environment and community can impact the pipe network. GIS is Transformational Implementing a modern GIS is transformational to a District Heating or District Cooling organization. It is the four in one solution to enable efficiencies across the entire organization. If you are planning a Digital Transformation at your organization a GIS is the foundation from which to build upon. PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are our own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions.   ... View more

 DHC2021 Symbols The symbols provided with this style file were created for use with ArcGIS applications. This DHC2021_symbols.stylx file contains symbols create specifically for the District Heating and District Cooling industries. The symbols correlate to the asset types defined in the District Heating and Cooling 2020 Data Model. If you have questions or comments, please post them to this geonet community, so everyone can see and share the information. Thank you Tom DeWitte Esri Technical Lead – District Heating and Cooling Industries  ... View more

By Tom DeWitte and Tom Coolidge Have you ever spent a day in the field with a senior cathodic protection (CP) field technician? It is an eye-opening experience to hear and see firsthand the struggles and difficulty they face maintaining a pipe system’s CP system.  If you have not and are involved in any way with managing CP data, we strongly recommend it. Spending time in the field with a CP technician will expose you to numerous test point readings, rectifier inspections, and other maintenance activities. And if you are lucky, you will get to see what happens when a test point reports an unacceptably low reading. When this happens the entire CP circuit is considered to be “down”.  This begins a troubleshooting process that can literally take months to resolve.  Yes, that is not a typo, it can take over a month for a senior technician to locate and resolve the root cause of a low test point reading.  A part of the reason for this long duration is access to information and tools to understand the circuit.  A modern GIS utility system can be a key provider of this information and tools.  Here are a few examples. What is the extent of the down CP circuit? A common question a CP field technician will ask when trying to understand the circuit they are inspecting is “what is the extent of this circuit”.  This is where the Esri Utility and Pipeline Data Model (UPDM) and its pipe-specific configuration can help. UPDM provides a configuration of the properties and capabilities of ArcGIS and its utility network to help address this question. Within UPDM is a configuration for managing CP assets.  This includes a subnetwork configuration that when utilized will generate and maintain a graphical representation of each unique CP circuit. This subnetwork layer is a standard Geodatabase featureclass that can be displayed in web and mobile applications. This means field technicians can view this information in the field on their mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.  Where are my test points? When a CP field technician receives a test point reading of less than -0.85 Volts, the circuit is considered to be “down”.  The next step for the CP field technician is to find and test the other test points on the circuit to see if the deficient reading is an anomaly. CP circuits are not always simply the connected metallic pipe assets running down a street in a straight line.  Sometimes they are spidery meandering subsystems whose legs stretch in many directions. This can make it difficult to locate the other test points associated with a specific CP circuit. Finding those other test points is a simple subnetwork controller trace with the ArcGIS utility network tracing tools. With the circuit’s test points now identified, the technician can easily locate and test the other test points. What does reconfiguring the circuit look like? When trying to locate the root cause of a CP circuit’s low reading, the field technician may decide to install an insulator to split the circuit. Here is another example of where the standard tracing tools provided with the ArcGIS utility network can help. Adding an insulator is a simple attribute update with the UPDM configuration for CP. All the editor needs to do is to update the fitting or device “Bonded/Insulated” attribute from “Bonded” to “Insulated”.  The embedded attribute rule will automatically update the “Cathodic Protection Traceability” attribute to “Not Traceable”. Cathodic Protection Traceability is configured to be a utility network, network attribute as part of UPDM.  This allows the attribute to be used as a constraint value by the standard ArcGIS utility network trace tool. Rerunning the same CP connected trace, shows the new configuration of the cathodic protection. With this new trace result a CP field technician can see the results of what the extent of the CP circuit will be with the newly installed insulator. Analytics for CP These examples of analytics and visualization of analytical processes can provide CP field technicians with the information and tools they need. Having this information and these tools can help CP departments to improve this time-consuming and expensive process. If you are someone who supports or assists with CP management at your organization, get your steel-toed boots out of the back of the closet and spend a day in the field. The understanding and appreciation of what these professionals do and their struggles for information and tools will be impactful. Additional Information If you missed our previous blog articles on Managing Cathodic Protection with UPDM, here are the links to those articles. In early 2020 we wrote a series of blog articles about leveraging the capabilities of ArcGIS to address the data management needs of cathodic protection for pipe systems. Those three blog articles explained how to organize and maintain information about a pipe system’s cathodic protection system.   Part 1: Managing Cathodic Protection  with UPDM 2019: The Basics Part 2: Managing Cathodic Protection with UPDM 2019: The Components Part 3: Managing Cathodic Protection with UPDM: The System PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are our own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions. ... View more

By Tom DeWitte Earlier today Esri posted the first ever industry data model for managing District Heating and District Cooling (DHC) pipe systems. This data model continues Esri’s efforts in providing industry specific template data models. The DHC 2020 data model provides District Heating and District Cooling organizations with an implementation ready configuration for Esri Geodatabase data repositories. This data model template is provided as a free download for all to use. Why Create This Data Model The goal of the DHC 2020 data model is to make it easier, quicker, and more cost effective for organizations responsible for the management of District Heating or District Cooling pipe systems to implement the ArcGIS platform. The DHC 2020 data model accomplishes this by freely providing a data model template that demonstrates a best practice configuration of the Esri geodatabase to address the system of record needs of DHC organizations. How was this Data Model Created Creating a new industry data model requires an immense amount of information.  More information than any one person or organization contains. Fortunately, many persons from around the world were willing to share their knowledge and time to help bring this data model to life.  This group effort from organizations big and small, public and private, incorporates hundreds of years of industry knowledge into this data model. Best Practice Application of ArcGIS Technology DHC 2020 was configured to take advantage of the latest capabilities provided by the ArcGIS Technology. This includes recent enhancements such as contingent values, attribute rules, and the Utility Network. In this data model you will find contingent value configurations to restrict the valid types of pipe insulation and pipe material based on whether the pipe transits, steam, condensate, heated water, or chilled water. Included in DHC 2020 are many attribute rules to automate attribute population as well as provide data quality checks. This data model includes utility network subnetwork configurations for defining pressure zones, circulation areas, leak detection zones, cathodic protection zones, and energy zones. And let’s not forget the thousands of connectivity, containment and association rules of the utility network. Industry Business Rules Business rules are a great way to share industry knowledge. Sometimes it is simple, such as ensuring that the maximum operating temperature is greater than the standard operating temperature, or that the in-service date occurred after the date of installation. Others are more complicated, such as knowing when to create a containment association between two assets.  Thanks to the combined knowledge of many persons across the industry, these business rule examples and many more are included with this data model. Sample Data Included in the download file stored on the District Heating and Cooling industry page of geonet in addition to the data model asset package is a sample dataset.  This dataset is fully 3D and provides great examples of the many facilities which participate in a District Heating or District Cooling pipe system.                 Data Dictionary As I noted in my October update, writing a data dictionary is not fun, but it is very important to explaining the what, the how and the why of the data model.  Work on the data dictionary is complete and included in the download file as a PDF document. This data dictionary includes descriptions of each featureclass subtype layer.  For each subtype layer a full description of each attribute that is appropriate is provided. Additionally, the data dictionary includes a listing and description of each attribute rule that is to be included with the data model.   How to Download This data model, its sample data, and data dictionary are available as a single download from the District Heating and Cooling industry page on geonet.  You can download it directly with this link: https://community.esri.com/t5/district-heating-and-cooling/district-heating-and-cooling-data-model-2020-release/ta-p/1008751 As noted previously, this data model is the cumulation of the input of many persons.  This data model can only evolve with your feedback. If you have suggestions for improving this data model or see something that requires correction to help the next person, please reply to this blog and post your feedback, or you can email me directly at: tdewitte@esri.com. ... View more

DHC 2020 Edition This is the official release of the 2020 Edition of the District Heating and Cooling Data Model (DHC2020). It is designed to support data management for the District Heating, Steam and District Cooling industries.  The downloadable files are: -DHC2020_AssetPackage.zip -DHC2020_DataDictionary.pdf The DHC2020_AssetPackage.gdb file geodatabase is an ArcGIS Pro version 2.6 asset package. The asset package includes the data model and the sample data. The data dictionary provides full documentation of the data model. If you have questions, please post them to this geonet community, so everyone can see and share the information. Thank you Tom DeWitte Esri Technical Lead – District Heating and Cooling Industries   ... View more