Space Imaging
Completes Florida County's Asset Management System Project
(13 April 2004) Space Imaging
has completed a comprehensive asset management system (AMS) for the Marion
County, Florida Engineering department valued at US$ 2.8 million. Space
Imaging's Solutions group developed the AMS for the county as a tool to manage
a rapidly developing infrastructure to support rising population influxes and
to help Marion County comply with the federal Governmental Accounting Standards
Board Statement 34 (GASB 34) requirements.
With more
than 2,300 paved and 500 unpaved road miles, Marion County has undergone
increasing growth and development in recent years, further stimulating the need
for a comprehensive up-to-date assessment for county authorities. Most
importantly, the county needed to obtain a more accurate accounting of all
infrastructure assets to be in compliance with GASB 34. The new AMS eliminates
superfluous records, fosters intra-departmental communications and assists with
GASB 34 reporting and compliance.
Newly collected 1-meter resolution
Ikonos satellite imagery allowed the joint Space Imaging-Marion County team to
develop a cost-effective methodology to locate, map, inventory, assess
condition levels, and determine the value of the county's road and storm water
assets. In addition, the Ikonos imagery was used as the basis for new
countywide maps of storm sewer facilities to satisfy National Pollutant
Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) requirements. Satellite imagery, coupled
with higher-resolution aerial photographs, also allowed the team to determine
pavement edges in order to obtain exact roadway measurements. The asset
management solution utilised both field data collection and image-based feature
extraction to build the required asset databases.
Space Imaging and
Jones, Edmunds and Associates Inc have been working with the county's
Engineering department to collect roadway asset data for incorporation into the
integrated AMS. More than 40,000 data points with full attribution were
collected and entered into the AMS in less than six months.
The
map-accurate Ikonos imagery also allowed the team to determine roadway
characteristics in order to obtain accurate roadway measurements. This
information was vital to developing a Pavement Management System that is
currently in use by the county. The Engineering department now has the ability
to monitor the overall health of its road network through proactive management
techniques developed by the Space Imaging team. Engineers are also using this
system to plan for future maintenance activities as well as for tracking
financial information related to current construction activities.
From
a technical standpoint, the objective was to make the AMS a complete GIS
product, easy to use and simple to update. Space Imaging's Solutions group
devised both components to be compatible for fieldwork on PDAs. ESRI's ArcPad
software was used to make the necessary mobile maps with full GIS capabilities
for field use. Space Imaging also administered user training to Marion County
officials and will continue to deploy on-site support.
(source: Space
Imaging)