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Marking Objects as ‘Inspected’

Having followed the guidance written through this manual, you will have either marked object as ‘To be Inspected’ at the initial project setup, or created new assets on site and inspected them.

The field ‘Inspection Status’ that is near the top of both the section/lateral header and the node header on the left side is a manually controlled field with no automation but as described previously it has a serious affect on the final calculated scoring grades and scores.

So, after an inspection, it is a good idea to go back into the header and change the value of this field to:

• Inspected - the asset has been inspected at least once.

• Unable to Assess - an inspection was attempted but was not possible for any reason.

• Not Attempted - no inspection of this asset has been attempted.

When the value of this field is set to ‘inspected’ then the computerised grading and scoring calculations take place inside the software, and also the ‘Quick Service’ and ‘Quick Structural’ grades are considered on the right side of the header. These grades only go through into the final export shapefiles if there are no observations attached to this inspection.

Why do we do this?

Any asset can be assessed at any time using the quick assessment method of grading, but if the object has an inspection with observation codes, then the computerised scoring takes over and trumps the quick grades.

It is common for surface continuous, region and point items to be assessed by the GPS team and not to use observation codes in the inspection data, so in these cases, the quick grades will follow through into the shapefiles. These values can be added to the incoming GIS data and imported into the project as described in Importing External Data.

Scoring

The scoring system used in HADDMS data is different to that used in WRc scoring in that the assessment grading of the inspection is calculated at the service and structural levels by considering only the highest score of each category in the inspection. In WRc scoring, the peak and mean scores are used to calculate the final inspection grade which requires some intense calculations in the background.

In both standards, scoring is always calculated an delivered at two levels:

• Observation level scoring (and grading for WRc)

• Inspection level scoring and grading

Observation Level Scoring

In the user interface of VX and in the pdf files with the pipe graph inspection reports, the observation score is presented. This is not the same as the grade which is normally a 1 - 5 value. WRc grading also uses scores in the background, but they are hidden from sight in the background and only the grades are presented to the user.

In HADDMS, we talk only about observation scores, not grades, although the grades are also presented in the user interface just for some lower level understanding, but they have no place in the data.

The score values range from:

• Structural - 1 to 165

  • < 10 - Grade 1

  • < 40 - Grade 2

  • < 80 - Grade 3

  • < 165 - Grade 4

  • ≥ 165 - Grade 5

• Service - 0.5 to 20

  • < 1 - Grade 1

  • < 2 - Grade 2

  • < 5 - Grade 3

  • < 10 - Grade 4

  • ≥ 10 - Grade 5

Why do we not consider grades at an observation level?

If you look inside the observation.dbf file for all of the asset inspection data, the only column for any scoring data is SCORE. There are no other scoring or grading columns and there is no distinction in the database file of whether or not the score is structural or service. This is not needed because the observation classes are defined in the documentation, so HADDMS already knows which codes are in which class.

WRc MSCC5 grading allows some observation codes to have both structural and service grades (MSCC4 scoring doesn’t). This is not the case with HADDMS ratings. The scores are either service or structural or blank. There is no zero score, just un-scored = null field value.

In the pdf printing of the inspection reports, you will see the score values down the right hand side of the page and not grade values like you see in WRc reports because of these reasons described above.

Asset Level Grading

The condition of the asset determined from the current inspection is driven by the observation codes within it. If we look inside the continuous, point and region shapefiles, there are 8 columns for the rating values:

So, in summary and as defined in the HADDMS data formats, observation code defect levels are described by structural and service scores and the asset condition is described by structural and service grades.

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