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Product category: CAD draughting software
News Release from: Bentley Systems | Subject: BE Award
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial Team on 22 July 2005

City of Toronto Wins 2005 BE Award

Toronto Water Integrated Network Skeletonisation Named Top Project in "Geospatial: Public Works" Category

The City of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has won a 2005 BE Award for its Toronto Water Integrated Network Skeletonisation project The award category was "Geospatial: Public Works." The BE Awards of Excellence, which are selected by an independent jury of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during the annual BE Conference (www.be.org), honour the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world's infrastructure

These projects set benchmarks for their industries, and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organisations that created them.

From a water model used by engineering and maintenance, the City of Toronto automatically generated a twin model for use by its asset management group.

The automation saved the city a great deal of money.

As Bob Gaspirc, manager of mapping services for the city, explains, "By enabling us to automatically skeletonise our complex water network from a high level of detail to less granular detail, WaterGEMS allowed us to bridge the data needs of two different user groups, while saving the city over $1 million Canadian." The City of Toronto's water network includes more than 3,500 miles of water mains, more than 65,000 water valves, almost 42,000 hydrants, and 450,000 service connections.

The Survey and Mapping Unit of the city's Technical Services Division maintains an as-built mapping environment that emulates this real-world network using MicroStation GeoGraphics and Bentley Water.

While the detailed network data was ideal for the needs of engineering and maintenance crews, it posed problems for the city's asset management group, which uses the data to model the water network and manage the capital work plan.

The increased number of graphic elements and database records required to maintain the physical water network's level of detail added complexity to the asset management group's work.

In fact, over time, this complexity threatened to disable all asset management and capital planning activities.

The answer was to create a twin water network with the lower level of detail required for the business of asset management.

The twin would be created using a process called skeletonisation, in which only those parts of the water network that have a significant impact on system behavior are selected for inclusion in the water distribution model.

The cost of this was initially estimated by Toronto to be $600,000 Canadian, with additional downstream maintenance costs of $500,000 Canadian over a 10-year period.

However, Bentley offered the city an alternative solution that was much easier to implement and administer than other approaches - all at a small fraction of the cost.

With the WaterGEMS Skelebrator module from Bentley's Haestad Methods product line, the city was able to automatically generate a separate data set to support the business processes of the asset management group.

While the physical network contains 307,956 pipes, the new asset management network model contains 76,989 pipes - one quarter the complexity.

In addition to providing a bridge between two different data models, two different users, and two different businesses, Bentley technology offered the City of Toronto a process that is automated, repeatable, and sustainable.

The solution is also scalable and flexible, allowing skeletonization for additional users with different needs. Request a free brochure from Bentley Systems ...

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