Applications of GIS in Civil Engineering
Civil engineering is about developing and sustaining infrastructure. As a result civil engineers work with a voluminous amount of data from a variety of sources.A tool that has proliferated within civil engineering in recent years is Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS technology provides tools for creating, managing, analyzing and visualizing the data associated with developing and managing infrastructure. This technology provides a wide range of civil engineering applications because of its potential to provide a new environment for problem solving which could lower cost, improve quality and support multi discipline analysis for complex projects. Some of these applications are:
· Infrastructure Life Cycle Management
· Transportation Projects
· Urban Development
· Target Site Selection
· Landfill Site Selection
· Mineral Mapping
· Critical Infrastructure Protection
· Route Analysis
· Watershed and Drainage Analysis
· Project Asset Management
GIS plays a vital role and serves as a complete platform in every phase of infrastructure life cycle. Each and every phase of infrastructure life-cycle is greatly affected and enhanced by the enrollment of GIS as explained below.
Planning:It contains high-level planning functions for site location including environmental impact mitigation, economic analysis, regulatory permitting, alternative siting analysis, routing utilities, what-if scenarios, visualization of concept options, data overlay, modeling, and benefit/cost alternatives analysis.
Data Collection: It has specific functions to collect precise site data used for predesign analysis; design; and calculations including field survey, topography, soils, subsurface geology, traffic, LIDAR, photogrammetry, imaging, sensitive environmental areas, wetlands, hydrology, and other sitespecific design-grade data.
Analysis: Analysis is one of the major and most influential phases of infrastructure life cycle. Analysis guides us about the validity or correctness of design or we can say that analysis is a method which supports our design. Some of the analysis that can be performed by GIS are:
· Water distribution analysis
· Traffic management analysis
· Soil analysis
· Site feasibility analysis
· Environment impact analysis
· Volume or Area analysis of catchment
· River or canals pattern analysis
· Temperature and humidity analysis
Construction: It is the stage when all layout plans and paper work design come into existence in the real world. The GIS helps the professionals to understand the site conditions that affect the schedule baseline and cost baseline. To keep the construction within budget and schedule GIS guides us about how to utilize our resources on site efficiency by:
· Timely usage of construction equipment.
· Working Hours
· Effects of seasonal fluctuations.
· Optimizing routes for dumpers and concrete trucks
· Earth filling and cutting
· Calculation of volumes and areas of constructed phase thereby helping in Estimation and Valuation.
Operations/Maintenance: It models utility and infrastructure networks and integrates other related types of data such as raster images and CAD drawings. Spatial selection and display tools allow you to visualize scheduled work, ongoing activities, recurring maintenance problems, and historical information. The topological characteristics of a GIS database can support network tracing and can be used to analyze specific properties or services that may be impacted by such events as stoppages, main breaks, and drainage defects.
GIS can help to make a record of work that has been completed and can give us visualization in the form of thematic maps which will guide us about rate of operations, completed operations and pending operations.
In short we can say that GIS will prove to be the foundation of next generation civil engineering.
