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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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. In the layers panel on the left hand side, select the ‘WinCan Manholes’ layer.

4. 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.

   1. 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.

5. Fill in as much information as you can about this catchpit in the pop up screen that you see:

   1. 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.

   2. 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.

   3. 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.

   4. 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.

   5. 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.

6. 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.

7. Now, repeat the process and plot the other catchpit CP2 on the other side of the motorway.

   1. 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.

8. The result is displayed in the image below ‘All finished’. Notice:

   1. There are no more nodes in the panel on the right side.

   2. The pipe section is drawn for you with the inspection line and any observations that you made during the inspection.

   3. 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.

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