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Introduction
Most of the descriptions included in this manual up to this point have been designed to help the guys on site in the CCTV truck work as effectively as possible to maintain efficiency and profitability during the works.
This section will refer the results from a number of other key sections of this manual which would normally be tasks that are completed in the WinCan project before it gets to the site crews, so a smooth and organised process of preparing the data for site from the front end is essential.
It is essential the section Using WinCan VX with WinCan Map is considered in detail before working through this section.
Plotting Uncharted Assets
There will often be instances where you need to create objects (pipes and nodes) in WinCan VX that do not exist in the loaded data, either because there simply is no existing data on the system for the stretch of highway that you are working on or because you because there is data, but you have located uncharted assets.
Creating sections with inspection data in WinCan VX is no different than it is in any other inspection standard and does not need describing here, but how do we plot the manholes quickly and effectively in WinCan Map while on site and avoid the need for paper drawings?
The first thing to remember here for the CCTV operator is that uber-accuracy is not possible or even required at this point. Think of WinCan Map as your paper drawing, and all you need to do is mark it up electronically rather than on a drawing with a pencil.
At a point in the future, during office post processing, we will import the actual GIS coordinates from the GPS team and update the data with accuracy, but at the the stage of van inspection, all we need to do is get it roughly right and try to create a drainage network on screen that is joined up and looks roughly right as to what you can see on the ground. As the on-site team, your eyes on the ground are extremely valuable to the processing team.
This process works best with good quality background tile layers as described in Useful External Files, but can also work at a less effective level with Google-style overhead imagery.
So, imagine this scenario:
You are working in a lane 1 closure on the Southbound side of the motorway and you find a catchpit (CP1) in the verge and the pipe flows across the carriageway to another catchpit in the verge on the other side (CP2) and you complete an inspection of the pipe, like this:
A simple 50m inspection across the carriageway from one side.
Now, because of the traffic management controls, you have no access to the verge on the Northbound side so you cannot actually see the catchpit CP2, but you know it’s there because you have seen it on the camera at a distance of 50m.
Also notice that the DDMS reference value is blank because this is an uncharted asset, and also the same in the nodes (maybe).
We already have enough information to plot these catchpits and we know roughly where we are by studying the surrounding features and/or the Nokia tile overhead imagery available in WinCan Map. So, we can plot the catchpits very quickly and draw the pipe in WinCan Map and this is a mock-up of what we might draw on a piece of paper:
Drainage layout that we wish to reproduce with coordinates.
Remember, the van is beside catchpit CP1 on the Southbound side. The first step is to plot CP1 as best we can in WinCan Map using a ‘point and click’ on screen, so no GPS equipment needed.
We only need to plot the nodes here. Once the two catchpits CP1 and CP2 are plotted, the pipe will be drawn automatically. WinCan VX joins the dots for you.
Activating the un-plotted nodes list.
In the ‘Tools’ ribbon of WinCan Map, click on the ‘Draw’ button and a new panel will open on the right hand side. In this panel there are 3 tabs at the top, click on the ‘Manholes’ tab. This will always show you an alphabetical list of all the nodes in your WinCan project that have no coordinates, so they are uncharted. In this case of course, both of the catchpits are uncharted at this stage.
Select the node that you wish to plot first. In this case it will be CP1 because the van is right next to it right now so we have a good idea of where it is.
In the layers panel on the left hand side, select the ‘WinCan Manholes’ layer.
In the ‘Tools’ ribbon, click on ‘Draw Point’ from the ‘Edit’ panel and then just click once on the screen workspace where you think the chamber is. Remember, it just has to be ‘good enough’ and you do not need to worry about accuracy here.
You will be prompted to create a default node (for non-HADDMS work) or a HADDMS node. Be sure to click on the HADDMS option.
Fill in as much information as you can about this catchpit in the pop up screen that you see:
The node ID (CP1) will be already populated in the field at the top because this is the one that was highlighted in the list on the right before you started.
The X and Y coordinates of where you clicked on the screen will be in the required boxes. You don’t need to worry about these.
Notice that there is no Z value. This is because when we ‘Point & Click’ a node position, we can get extremely accurate X and Y coordinates but we can never get a Z coordinate. It doesn’t matter because remember, at some point in the future, all of the GIS data will be updated during post processing.
Be sure to fill in the ‘Type’ and ‘Node Type’ selection boxes correctly. These fields are very important to get right and they refer to the object types described in Understanding Object Types.
Fill in as much of the other fields as you can, but these are not so important from a data perspective. Notice that the ‘Depth’ field is the depth of the node and not necessarily the depth of the pipe as is the case in a catchpit, so be clear in your mind which depth value goes in the section header pipe depth fields and the node header node depth field.
See the result in the image below ‘First node plotted’ and notice that there is now only one remaining node in the list on the right hand side.
Now, repeat the process and plot the other catchpit CP2 on the other side of the motorway.
When we inspected the pipe in WinCan VX, we created an inspection that was 50m long, so we know roughly how long the pipe is. You can use the ‘Rule’ on the right hand side of the ‘Home’ tab in WinCan Map to measure out a line that is roughly 50m long to get an even better idea of where CP2 really is.
The result is displayed in the image below ‘All finished’. Notice:
There are no more nodes in the panel on the right side.
The pipe section is drawn for you with the inspection line and any observations that you made during the inspection.
This is good enough for the CCTV team to plot a pipe like this and no access was needed to the other side of the carriageway. We are simply using our best engineering judgement to plot these catchpits in the certain knowledge that at a point in the future, the GIS team will update the coordinates with real 3D values from their surveying equipment.
Plotting a node in Map.
First node plotted.
All finished.
Connecting a Lateral to a Main
Now, let’s extend the previous inspections so that it has some connection code in the inspection data at 25m (at 2 o’clock) and 32m (at 10 o’clock), and there are some gullies on each side of the central reserve plotted in the data, like this:
Connection codes in the inspection and pre-plotted gullies on each carriageway.
At the point of making the connection observations (and these can be any junction or connection codes), the user is presented with this special field in the observation data entry window:
Observation data entry for connections and junctions.
This field allows us to enter the node ID of the point item that is upstream from the connection or junction, so in the first case of the junction at 2 o’clock it is most likely to be GY1000 and in the second case for the connection at 10 o’clock, it is likely to be GY2000.
In this field you can:
Select a point item that already exists in the data - you must type in the first two characters of the node before the list self-populates.
Enter the node ID of a new point item that currently does not exist in the data.
After you have done this, have a look in the node area of WinCan VX:
New nodes added by the software.
Notice that we now have 6 nodes, where before we started these additional steps, there were only 2 (CP1 and CP2). You will see that the gullies GY1000 and GY2000 have been created and also that the connector nodes CN_GY1000_CP1.1 and CN_GY2000_CP1.1 have also been created at the observation code coordinates.
Info - this only works as expected in the HADDMS typical naming convention of you have setup WinCan VX exactly as described in Setting Up WinCan VX for HADDMS.
All that remains to be done to complete the ‘dot-to-dot’ is to create laterals for the two gully legs. You can do this even if you cannot inspect them on this shift. You are simply creating the assets, not carrying out an inspection, because on this shift you cannot get to the central reservation.
Why create laterals and not sections? Refer back to Section & Lateral Differences where the differences between sections and laterals are described in detail, and the golden rule is that a lateral is any linear asset with a connector node at the downstream end.
So, after we create 2 laterals, the VX lateral list looks like this:
GY1000 → CN_GY1000_CP1.1
GY2000 → CN_GY2000_CP1.1
Laterals created.
Notice that the laterals have the required upstream and downstream node IDs but they do not have any inspection data. They can be inspected on the next shift when we have a lane 3 central reserve traffic management closure.
Be sure to set the pipe depth in the lateral header at the downstream end of these pipe to be blank or zero to avoid any unnecessary calculations as described in Being Smart with Z Values.
Look also now in WinCan Map and see that everything is drawn already:
WinCan Map plan with laterals added and connected.
How has this happened? Did you notice that t no point was there any nodes listed in the manhole panel on the right side? This is because at all times the items had geometry, whether they were plotted by the user or automatically by the software, so as soon as the laterals were created, the lines were drawn.
Hint - there is one final step to this process that ensures good quality data going forwards and prevents the laterals from becoming ‘disconnected’ from the section when the GIS data is imported. This is an essential step and is best done by the CCTV crew because they have the ‘eyes on site’, but can also be done during post processing… read on.
In the section observation grid view, you will see a ‘Lateral’ column with a grey button similar to the ones found in the photo and movie clip columns. These means that you can attach ‘something’ to this observation:
Lateral link flag location.
In this case, we can tie the lateral into the section at this observation code by double clicking on the grey button of the correct observation and selecting the lateral that is connected here, and the result looks like this:
Laterals linked.
The icon shows you that a lateral is tied in here and double clicking on this link will take you straight to that lateral in the other grid view, and there is also a button with an ‘up’ triangle arrow in the lateral grid view which will bring you bak to the section that this lateral is linked to.
Advice - although this technique does not really appear to make a great difference to the data and the drainage network design, it’s power is that because the laterals and the section are now tied together, when we introduce the GIS data at a future point and in that data, the 2 gullies and the 2 catchpits now have new coordinates in 3 dimensions (so far, everything has had no Z value here), the shape geometry of the sections and laterals will be modified and the coordinates of the connector nodes will be replotted, so everything will stay tied together when the new positions are introduced.
If you do not make the lateral links, then the lateral pipes will become detached from the section when the new positions are brought in and it becomes very (unnecessarily) time consuming to re-attach them all.
There are some additional techniques for joining objects together using the snapping tools in WinCan Map, but these are more usually used by data processing teams, and will be described in Snapping Objects in WinCan Map.