Ovidiu Clotea
CONEL-S.D.E.E. Brasov, 17A, 13 December 1918, Brasov-2200, tel:0040-68-410430 ext.250, fax:0040-68-152186, E-mail: clotea@hotmail.com

Abstract

C.O.N.EL. - S.D.E.E. Brasov, a subsidiary of Romanian National Power Company wanted to develop its information system of installation structure.
Because the system’s components are in connection with the ground through their geographical position it has been decided that a part of the application to be a GIS.
We have developed a PC based LAN system to assist our workers in creating, developing and managing the digital maps of power network and also to design new installations using the created spatial databases.
The application was written using VisualBasic 5, Visual C++ and MapObjects 1.2 and it works in a Windows NT 4.0 LAN. 

INTRODUCTION

The most important reasons of developing a GIS at S.D.E.E. Brasov are:

• The geographical position of F.D.E.E. Brasov installations is part of the National Cadastral System. So, our company needs to know its properties and the neighborhood of them;
• for optimization of accidental or programmed interventions and for improve our relation with different kind of customers;
• there are a lot of "mind information" known only by old workers who will be retired and also there are a lot of perishable information on paper support (fig.4);

METHODOLOGY AND IMPLEMENTATION

This project needed to solve following aspects:

• Our regions maps are old (1970 - 1980) and very expensive too. They are only raster images (fig.1);
• Our company is a distributed one. So, we needed a lot of GIS licenses and it doesn't have so much money. Also we didn't need the whole functionality of a GIS because the most part of the time we are working with lines;
• we needed a fast developing of spatial database;
• we needed a very personalized application because a small part of our people knows English and they haven't knowledge of GIS or computing;
• we haven't enough human resources for digitizing the maps.

We solved these problems developing an application using MapObjects, which is a strongly customized COM, and it is also accessible as price for our company.
We use as background raster georeferiencied raster images at scale 1:1000,1:2000,1:5000 (fig.1, fig.2) and we made A a digitizing (tracing) software. A big part of our effort was to remake the raster images, which had a very poor quality.
We made a partial tracing because we are interested only in the neighborhood of our overhead lines or underground cables. The software has the most part of functions of a CAD (snapping, vertex editing etc.).
So, we obtained a combined raster-vector map (fig.3a, fig.3b) on which, using special created utilities, we are putting our objectives (networks and buildings) (fig.4, fig.5). We also introduced a dimension utility, very useful in printed maps (fig.6).

CONCLUSION

We succeeded in creating a cheap professional geographic information system. Now we are working in the acquisition of spatial data. We use medium level personnel in teamwork in a LAN.
The work is fast because even if we have only raster maps of a region we are able to put electric networks after scanning them immediately.

Fig.1 Raster image - Original Document

Fig.2 2 Georeferencied Customized Raster image (you can see the demarcation zone)

Fig. 3a Raster + Vector Map

Fig. 3b Vector Map

Fig.4 Sketch of a underground cable (primary document)

Fig.5 Underground Cable on the map. You can see the dimensioning system

Fig.6 Special Utility for adding the position of cable

Editing (points, lines, polygons, curves) Snap tools

Editing Vertex Dimensioning

Fig7. Utilities