Study on Techniques of an Integrated Management Platform for Urban Underground Pipeline Networks

Abstract

It has become a trend for urban underground pipeline management to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to manage spatial and non-spatial data of underground pipelines. Urban underground pipeline networks belong to different owners, due to the great variety and unique characteristics; there are a variety of sources, formats and structures of pipeline data. While using traditional GIS applications, it is difficult to realize the aim that the data is managed and shared uniformly. Modifications and extensions of users' operation requirements often compel developers to adjust the design and implementation of an information system, which makes it difficult to control the period and cost of the development process. Besides, when operating a GIS application after constructing, the user could hardly responds to any changes of the new requirements only by themselves. Hence the efficiency of pipeline management will be inevitably lowered. As to overcome the shortcomings of traditional pipeline GIS systems, this paper presents a new integrated management platform for urban underground pipeline networks. It adopts a GIS service-oriented architecture technology (called it Data Center core technology) and supports three novel development modes, i.e., framework oriented development, plug-in enabled development and configuration driven development. With this technique multi-source heterogeneous data of underground pipeline can be integrated together and managed uniformly, and the expanded and configurable pipeline data model can be set up. In a unified integration framework the management platform based on the Data Center manages all kinds of the operation functional plug-ins in a loosely-coupling manner. The plug-ins is allowed to be freely uploaded or downloaded. Users can customize features of plug-ins according to their own needs and hence configure a unique urban underground pipeline GIS application system to meet the dynamical changes of the pipeline operation flow. The platform integrated abundant plug-ins, such as database construction, management, design, analysis and so on. The Data Center core technique, the integrated management platform along with the plug-ins form a self-contained management solution for pipeline data integration and a ideal data updating mechanism, which may provide effective real- time information services about the comprehensive underground pipeline for municipal public enterprises and government departments.