Leveraging Business Intelligence from Legacy Data to Optimize Utility Operations and Decision Making

The value of implementing GIS and Asset Management tools to support the study, planning, design, operations, maintenance, and upgrades of utility infrastructure is rapidly increasing for utility owners and their support teams. These tools support more manageable manipulation of vast data sets and facilitate the creation of compelling visuals that increase efficiency and allow for more accurate and thoughtful approaches to solving problems commonly observed in utility infrastructure projects. The City of Chelsea, MA. (City) identified a need for a robust Asset Management (AM) system that can leverage existing legacy data, extracting the necessary business intelligence to inform the decision-making process. This included enhancing data visualization and providing the right access to the right data at the right time to the city stakeholders to optimize day-to-day utility operations. The City collaborated with Dewberry and provided their vision for modernizing the water, sewer, drainage, and transportation infrastructure. In particular, the City's 'SMART Infrastructure for Tomorrow' Plan identified goals toward the creation of products that would streamline workflows for the Department of Public Works. These products included: 1.LiDAR-generated base map of the entire City. 2.Geospatial layers for existing infrastructure and available private utilities. 3.Hydraulic models to inform a fully separated City-wide drainage system. 4.Comprehensive inventorying of all infrastructure, including existing conditions and lifecycle. 5.Capital plan separated into 5-year periods focused on critical Infrastructure The City identified that these needs could be addressed through the implementation of a master plan program, which included planning/technical support and improvements to their GIS and Asset Management Systems. These improvements would include data reconnaissance, review of existing available data, gap analysis, tracking of available construction records, data attribution/incorporation of readily available resources (including newly acquired City-wide LiDAR topography and spherical imagery), and piloting of an ArcGIS Online-integrated field data collection program. A review of the City's Sewer GIS databases would provide a better understanding of the different attribute fields, data schema, and their data contents. This included writing a description for each field and identifying fields that should be deleted, archived, modified, or updated with current information. GIS data pertaining to the existing water distribution system, storm water drainage system, and sanitary sewer system were updated as required for modeling efforts and as opportunities for field data collection arose. These updates were based on City Records or direct field data collection. A validation procedure was also used to check for compatibility with infrastructure modeling software (Innovyze InfoWorks ICM and Bentley WaterCAD) and to do a preliminary connectivity and topology check. A field data collection application suite was also piloted for the City's Cross Connection Control program. This was built by integrating Survey123 with several ArcGIS Online applications — All paper inspection forms (including Backflow Prevention Device Inspection & Maintenance forms and Cross Connection Survey forms) were converted to digital survey forms that can be completed from any device, and the system is linked to the City's GIS, a network drive, and the City's email systems. The solutions and tools used in these efforts are scalable and sustainable which can be applied to any linear infrastructure asset such as water, wastewater, reclaimed water, storm water, and oil/natural gas systems for informed decision making. They provide the necessary business intelligence for making informed asset management decisions based on current conditions and available infrastructure data. This streamlined approach allows for the leveraging of existing data repositories to support and improve infrastructure Asset Management, ultimately providing a plan to focus the limited available resources and funding on the most immediate needs.