Pinellas County's engineers can create digital terrain models from LIDAR aerial survey data, rendering the land's surface as a 3D mesh of triangles. Click here to enlarge imageInformation that is usually scattered across different paper sources and computer records has been unified into one repository with many layers.
Pinellas County first implemented a Vision database - an Oracle-driven, map-based enterprise system later acquired by Autodesk - at a time when only four other jurisdictions in the United States had one. The county developed a centralized GIS called Enforcer, which allows police officers to track sexual predators or view concentrations of recent crime activity through Web-based maps that run on Autodesk MapGuide.
Most recently, the county was once again among the first in the nation to adopt ProjectPoint (formerly Buzzsaw), Autodesk's online project collaboration service. The system allows Pinellas project managers, engineers and outside contractors to communicate and exchange materials, such as project plans, over a secure Web site.
Managing Storms
At the Department of Public Works, which builds and maintains about half the county's roads as well as park facilities, drainage systems and beach renourishment projects, more than 50 employees use Autodesk's Land Development product suite - Land Desktop, Civil Design and Survey - as a design tool. Among their main tasks is controlling how any new road, parking lot or other structure will affect the flow of stormwater.
Larry Solien, the department's Engineering Applications Manager, said teams of government surveyors (or private contractors) collect point data at a job site to compile an electronic "field book." That data is downloaded into Land Desktop 2i, where survey CADD technicians create a drawing file that reflects existing features on the site such as the road's centerline, topography and surrounding utility lines. The surface point data is then converted into a triangular irregular network (TIN), a 3-D model that depicts surfaces as a mesh of triangular faces. When technicians add "intelligent" ARX drawing objects showing slopes and contours, the result is a complete 3-D image of the project area that will serve as the basis for construction plans.
The Southwest Florida Water Management District issues permits for construction of any new road in Pinellas. The permits mandate that any water discharge from the road must be preserved at current levels. The county is thus required to determine what water collection rates are "normal" and build drainage ponds near the road to keep those levels there, preventing erosion.
The ponds are tracked in a county database, "so we don't forget what we built and what we have to maintain," said Steve Burke, P.E., and engineering project manager at Public Works.
When roads need drainage grates that feed into sewer systems, engineers first do a "soft dig" to map out all the existing underground utilities, such as gas, water and phone lines.
"We want to build 3-D pipe diagrams so we can identify conflicts as we're assembling the design," said Solien. "We put all the surveyors' utility positions into the Pipeworks module in LDT [Land Development Desktop], and when we look at the resulting 3-D image, we can see how everything is in the real world: can we really put that 60-inch reinforced concrete pipe on the side of the road?"