River Crossings: Developing a Mobile GIS Approach to Monitoring Activities

TGN operates a system of 9,000 kilometers of natural gas pipelines with numerous river crossings. According to the mandatory monitoring program, river crossings are visited at least once a year with additional visits for major rivers during the rainy season. Basic data such as depth of cover for each line, photographs and descriptions are surveyed in the field. Later on, this information is manually entered in an electronic form for its use in risk analysis, to evaluate the need of remediation works. This task has two main problems: first, it is very time consuming for surveyors, and second, it is difficult to know the location within the river crossing where data was taken. At the end, monitoring forms came late in the year and its information is difficult to understand. To cope with this problem, a new approach was developed. A GIS mobile application was developed and installed in tablets used in the field, guiding the surveyor through the completion of an electronic form along each pipeline, having a satellite image in the background, as a global reference of where he is standing. All the information is geo-referenced using a built-in GPS. Once it is finished, by means of a simple WIFI/4G connection, information is sent to GIS servers, without the need to be typed at the office. Later on, it is captured and placed into the monitoring form format. Specialists can access and evaluate this information from the database visualizing it in the corporate GIS with minimum delay. This improvement has resulted in a significant decrease in time for the entire data flow process and a better quality of the information gathered, which results in a more realistic risk analysis.