.NET solution shields water supply against digging damage

• Underground utilities demanded improved asset location infobank
• .NET solution offers faster, more flexible, ‘future-proof’ upgrade
• Improved tool offers increased functionality and reduces manual input

Vital utilities such as communications, water, gas and electricity depend heavily on underground cabling and pipes. Damage or disruption to these underground assets is inconvenient at best; at worst, it can be life threatening or commercially disastrous. Damage can also be expensive to repair.

An effective “Dial Before You Dig” asset location service is therefore essential to prevent people accidentally damaging vital underground cables and pipes. Potential diggers are legally required to contact a central dial-up system that catalogues the exact location of all buried utilities, to avoid excavations that endanger crucial services.

When Melbourne Water (MW) recently decided it was time to update its “Dial Before You Dig” service, it had several important milestones to tick off.

“The company wanted to improve its service by making it faster, more reliable and functional by building in ‘future proofing’. It also wanted the service to be capable of working with much less manual interference,” says Alister Grigg, manager of business solutions at developer Volante Solutions Pty Ltd.

“The central Mapbase system [jointly managed by the communications, water, gas and electricity industries] had been recently improved, with extended dial-up access times, plan-request to location linking, and additional methods of transmitting plans,” says Grigg.

The .NET developed system, which went live at the end of May, is an enhanced, state-of-the-art, fully automated internal referral processing system that advises callers of the exact location of MW’s vulnerable underground pipes, cables and sewers.

“MW also saw this as an ideal opportunity to test the .NET platform in a real-life application before using it on other, larger projects,” adds Grigg.

MW took the opportunity to improve customer service by minimising the need for manual intervention, and by increasing the number of ‘system smarts’ to guarantee on-time data delivery no matter how the response was delivered – with the added bonus of a cost reduction per request for MW.

Paperless delivery of the majority of location plans is now possible by direct links to the central Mapbase GIS (Geographic Information System) server. Requests are passed straight through to email and fax servers and so to the client. If no email or fax contact is supplied by the inquirer, a printed plan is automatically generated and sent by post within two days.

“Using .NET allowed us to cut our development time considerably, as we only started developing the system towards the end of December,” says Grigg. “This was about one-third of the time we would have expected to take using Visual Basic 6,” he adds.

Development of the system required about 1,000 man-hours and took advantage of the ‘reusable component’ aspect of .NET. This ensured that future developments would be easy to duplicate and extend. Grigg says these could include direct paging of data to handheld devices for real-time asset location if required.

The Volante development team used Microsoft Visual Studio .NET exclusively to develop the system. The core elements were generated with Visual Basic .NET and C# .NET, with SQL Server and Word used for database access, document templates and PDF generation.

“The use of .NET suited both us and Melbourne Water. It was low-risk for them, and it allowed us to develop reusable components that we can use in future projects; for example, the built-in workflow application,” says Grigg.

“The industry is moving towards a .NET standard, and it is definitely faster to develop and deploy than other platforms. But the best thing is it allowed us to deliver cost-effectiveness to our customer and keep our costs low at the same time.

“It has definitely proven itself in our environment.”