TUgis Conference 2019

The Baltimore City Conduit Division performs engineering, maintenance, construction and inspection of conduit infrastructure within the city’s right of way and ensures accurate reviews between submissions provided by developers, contractors or internal agencies/resources and Permit granting authorities. GIS applications such as ArcMap and ArcFM have historically been applied and customized for processes related to field data capture and analysis thereby allowing proper review, approval and oversight of proposed conduit facilities. As an enterprise funded division of the City, the leasing of space in the more than 12,000 utility manholes (with over 1,600 miles of conduit) to power utility, telecommunications and fiber optic companies, is the primary method its operational revenue is generated for new builds and maintenance. The Conduit Manager Extension in ArcFM, developed by Schneider Electric, a leading company in digital transformation of energy management and automation is the primary application used to build underground facility diagrams for each manhole structure and to capture occupancy updates. From this data, a series of analytical processes can occur to produce industry specific products to determine occupancy, ownership and configuration. The latest development supporting business intelligence and asset monitoring is integrating an asset management application process called Cityworks, the leading GIS-centric system for public asset management supporting linking assets with work requests. In addition, a hybrid application called Activity Manager allows the manhole inspectors to electronically update the duct occupancy as well as the exact linear footage. This process allows the city to digitally document the occupancy updates “near real time” and generate reports and dashboards based on those updates for accounting and/or billing.