ABSTRACT

Many civil engineering students at Cal Poly Pomona work as interns to get practical experiences in planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of facilities. They are often challenged at their workplace to manage data associated with various location specific facilities. This paper addresses an application-oriented teaching approach to incorporate students' working experiences into GIS education. The approach involves 1) identifying spatial issues and problems in students' workplace, 2) introducing students to the fundamentals of GIS technology, and 3) training students to develop and implement GIS projects using data from their workplace. A number of student projects discussed in the paper show that the approach is effective in GIS education.
 

INTRODUCTION

Incorporating GIS technology into civil engineering curricula is an important task that challenges civil engineering departments at various universities. As many GIS applications have been developed in transportation, water resource management, environmental analysis, and other areas of civil engineering, a significant number of universities have developed courses that concentrate on GIS education and research. As one such university, Cal Poly Pomona launched a "GIS Literate Campus Initiative" in 1998 that aims at GIS education and research across campus. In response to the initiative, the Civil Engineering Department is actively incorporating GIS technology into its current curricula. This paper discusses the experiences learned from that incorporation.

Effective GIS education requires a clear understanding of students' needs. Many civil engineering students at Cal Poly Pomona work as interns to obtain practical experiences in public and private sectors. A recent survey of seniors indicates that their intern work concentrates on the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of various location specific facilities (such as highways, bridges, buildings, water channels and water tanks). Students are often assigned to collect, store and manage data associated with facilities. They are experiencing various needs of using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to solve civil engineering problems that require spatial information. Students working in the transportation field apply GIS techniques in the areas of travel demand forecasting, highway design, and transportation system management. Students with internships in water engineering have strong needs to use GIS tools for water resource management and hydrologic analysis. Students in the areas of geo-environmental engineering are highly interested in the use of GIS spatial analysis functions to evaluate environmental impacts of various civil projects and to develop appropriate mitigating measures. Students working in surveying engineering firms and agencies are exposed to the integration of GIS and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technologies.

The significant scope of GIS needs among students raise a challenging issue; that is, how to incorporate student working experiences into effective GIS education at the undergraduate level. This paper provides an application-oriented teaching approach that aims at meeting students' needs in GIS training. The approach involves 1) identifying spatial issues and problems in students' workplace, 2) introducing students to the fundamentals of GIS technology, and 3) training students to develop and implement GIS projects using data from their workplace. The paper begins by evaluating and expanding students' GIS exposure. It then introduces various techniques involved in identifying spatial issues and problems that students may have in their practice in civil engineering. It further discusses the basic GIS concepts and functions and the data issues that students need to know before they initiate their open-ended projects. The paper concludes by summarizing students' projects that show the effectiveness of this teaching approach.
 

Evaluating and EXPANDING Student's GIS Exposure

The Civil Engineering Department at Cal Poly Pomona offers a series of GIS courses at the undergraduate level to respond to the needs of GIS education. A survey of students who took the course "GIS Applications in Civil Engineering" in 1999 indicates that many students are exposed to geographic data. They, however, do not know how to use GIS technologies to manipulate the data for improving their internship performance in various areas of civil engineering.

A way to better prepare students for understanding GIS technologies is to present students with a number of GIS applications. A book entitled "Zeroing In" by Andy Mitchell describes numerous applications or projects that real people actually have used GIS for water/sewer system management, emergency dispatching, and land development (Mitchell, 1998). Students are required to read the book and identify GIS applications and their associated spatial analysis functions and data. Students need to accomplish a triangle graph for each application in the book. Figure 1 shows an example triangle graph designed for a GIS application called PIPELINE-FIX (French and Jia, 1997). The application uses a group of GIS functions to simulate damages to a water supply network due to an earthquake, to evaluate societal impacts of the broken water network, and to develop an optimal repair plan for the network. The GIS functions consist of spatial overlay operations, network analyses, spatial analyses, and AML programming. The data used for the application include 1990 Census data, business data, as well as data about a water supply network and earthquake intensities of the Memphis Metropolitan area.

The above "triangle method" is effective in expanding students' exposure to various GIS issues. Not only are students aware of the importance of GIS applications in civil engineering, but also they are able to build their understanding of the relationships between an application and its supporting GIS functions and data. By a systematic review of various real applications, students also understand that the challenging issues related to the development of a GIS application are 1) to identify spatial issues and problems, 2) to prepare needed spatial data and attributes, and 3) to customize GIS functions and utilities.

There are an increasing number of technical reports and papers about GIS applications in civil engineering that are available in various journals (ASCE journals) and proceedings (Esri's User Conferences) as well as on the Web (www.bts.gov). Using the triangle method to analyze GIS papers and project reports related to a specific civil engineering field, students are able to get experiences and expand their exposure to the use of GIS technologies in the field.
 

IDENTIFYING SPATIAL ISSUES AND PROBLEMS

With an understanding of what GIS technology can do in civil engineering, students are required to identify spatial issues and problems in their intern workplace. In doing so, students can experience a process regarding the formulation of a GIS application in transportation, water management, or environmental engineering. Furthermore, students can build their interests in learning GIS technologies in order to solve problems identified at their workplace.

Many students appear to be frustrated when first confronted with the formulation of a GIS application. A way to help students overcome this frustration is to educate them with methods for GIS needs assessment. A needs assessment is critical to the successful implementation of GIS applications for an organization. It is a systematic investigation of the following:

            1)  Applications to be developed so that current business can be done more
                 efficiently or effectively in a GIS
            2)  GIS functions required for each identified application
            3)  Data needed in the GIS databases
            4)  Data maintenance procedures

There are several methods available for needs assessment. These methods are classified as application-oriented, data-oriented, and technology-oriented methods. An application-oriented method focuses on the business of an organization. It, therefore, requires that people involved in the assessment have an overall understanding of the business. Although the method is time-consuming, it is indeed well suited for business improvement. A data-oriented method is often applied in an organization whose challenging issues are to identify what can be done using rich sets of data currently available in the organization. A technology-oriented method, different from the first two methods, is based on a successful enterprise-wide GIS implementation. Its concentration is to clone the GIS system to a similar organization. This method provides a "quick and dirty" solution; however, it requires extensive refinement and twisting efforts to ensure that the system works for the organization.

Students are provided with a group of case studies that use the three methods. After examining these case studies, students are further required to use the application-oriented approach to identify a GIS project that can improve job performances in their workplace. Students are encouraged to interview experienced engineers and managers in their workplace to outline the scope of the project and to identify data associated with the project. A project proposal is required that shows objectives of the project, potential GIS functions to be used, and supporting spatial data and attributes.

In considering time constraints and limited resources available for students, the instructor should evaluate students' proposals and make sure that the proposal goals are attainable and the projects can be accomplished within the time allowed. The evaluation is an active consultation process during which the instructor and students work together to refine the scope of the projects.

Table 1 summarizes the topics of GIS class projects that students proposed and implemented for the course "GIS Applications in Civil Engineering". Clearly the projects ran across areas in transportation, environmental engineering, surveying engineering, and GIS customization. Additionally, a specific project proposal, "Site Selection," was provided for students without internships because they had some difficulty in identifying a GIS application and its associated data. The proposal outlines the scope of work in regards to the selection of a new airport, bank, or gas station. The data used in the project were provided at Esri's web site.
 
 

Fundamentals of GIS Technologies

Students are introduced to the fundamentals of GIS technologies during the time when they initiate a potential GIS application for their workplace. An excellent textbook that discusses the GIS basics is the book entitled "Getting to Know ArcView GIS" written by Esri (Esri, 1996). The book incorporates the triangle graphs discussed in the previous sections and describes GIS concepts and functions as well as spatial database management in a rich set of application scenarios or problem settings. Students are required to read the book and accomplish all the exercises in the book. In doing so, students can learn the basic GIS technologies and continue to expand their GIS exposure not only to what GIS technology can do, but also to how GIS techniques can be applied for problem solving. This type of exposure is very important. It supports students in building their GIS skills that are needed for the implementation of their project.

Additionally, students are provided with advanced GIS techniques to complement their understanding of GIS technology learned from the above book. Such provision is given on a request basis because student projects vary and each project requires a unique set of GIS spatial analysis operations. In response to the unique requirements of a GIS project, advanced GIS techniques such as GIS customization utilities and extensions are needed. It is impossible, however, for the instructor to discuss, within limited lecture time, various advanced technologies (such as programming with Avenue and MapObjects) and extensions (such as dialog designers). Instead, the instructor provides guidance and help to students who are involved in the use of advanced GIS technologies.
 

STUDENT CLASS PROJECTS

Three of 49 student class projects are selected in this paper to demonstrate that the above mentioned teaching approach is effective. The first project is a small-scale, business-oriented ArcView GIS application system for water consumption analysis, water conservation, routine maintenance tracking, meter replacement, and system shutdown analysis utilizing data from the Yorba Linda Water District (Lemon, 1999; Lemon, 2000). The second project is a prototype pavement condition mapping system for the City of Montclair (Elsayed, 1999). The third project is a prototype interactive mapping system whose objective was to help the Facilities Department of Cal Poly Pomona manage inventories of campus buildings in an efficient and interactive manner (Moreno, 1999). The project was done using Avenue programs and the Dialogue Designer extension.
 

Project #1    Preliminary GIS Pilot Study for the Yorba Linda Water District

This study shows a unique way of bringing GIS technologies into the Yorba Linda Water District (YLWD) that provides water and sewer services to the City of Yorba Linda and portions of Placentia, Anaheim, Brea and unincorporated Orange County, CA. Detailed description of the study can be found in the paper " GIS Zeroing In: Yorba Linda Water District Experience" presented at the Twentieth Annual Esri International User Conference. Below is a summary of the project.

The project used the triangle method and the application-oriented needs assessment approach discussed in the previous sections to investigate the GIS needs within the District. The study indicated that the most challenging issue within the District was to explore the benefits, usefulness and limitations of the GIS technology as an enterprise solution to departmental decision making prior to major GIS investment. This is a common challenge among small, specialized government agencies that tend to regard GIS as a technological solution only suited for large, multi-departmental organizations, such as cities and state agencies.

A prototype GIS system was developed in this project. The intent of the system was to identify various potential uses of GIS technology and examine data issues and technical requirements related to a large-scale GIS investment that includes customer services, facility management, work order processing, capital facilities planning and engineering analyses. Figure 2 shows the study area. This area is a representative portion of the entire water/wastewater systems. GIS issues related to this area are clearly the issues that must be handled in the large-scale GIS implementation.

Figure 3 shows a pipeline shutdown analysis within the GIS system. A shutdown involves isolating a section of pipe and then proceeding to drain it, thereby disrupting services to all parcels connected to that specific pipe section. Once the pipe is drained and no longer pressurized, a section of the existing water main can be removed and a new mainline connection constructed. Prior to any fieldwork, a shutdown analysis must be performed in the Engineering Department of the District to determine which valves must be closed in order to isolate the necessary section of the main. Related maps and drawings are further analyzed to determine which parcels and fire hydrants will be out of service. A list of affected customers is then drafted and notification letters advising of the temporary disruption in service are prepared for distribution. Additionally, the Fire Authority is notified of specific fire hydrants that will be temporarily out of service.

The GIS system uses spatial analysis functions to automatically determine all affected parcels and facilities (see Figure 3). The results that contain customer name and address information can be exported to a word processing program to perform a mail merge for the standard notification letters. This approach works very well for situation that does not involve terminus mains branching off from the selected main. As ArcView does not have tracing capabilities, it is unable to detect branched terminus mains and associated service lines. Identification of such ArcView limitation in shutdown analysis is helpful in providing appropriate spatial requirements for the large-scale GIS implementation.

The low-cost, in-house GIS effort shown in the project clearly serves as a catalyst in obtaining support from an agency's upper management and governing political body which may in turn result in a willingness to commit significant funds to large-scale GIS exploration and implementation. The Yorba Linda study demonstrates not only a new approach of needs assessment for small and medium-size water/wastewater service agencies with "ground zero" GIS knowledge, but also the effectiveness of the application-oriented teaching approach.
 

Project #2    Pavement Condition Mapping for the City of Montclair

This project shows GIS mapping of road conditions of the City of Montclair. In 1997, the City completed a pavement condition survey of each city street and rated the conditions based on the type of maintenance needed. The challenging issues after the survey were to show the road ratings on the City's street map and to visualize the pavement conditions.

The project initiated a GIS solution to address the above issues. It went through the GIS application development process from problem identification and proposal writing to data collection and preparation, manipulation of GIS functions, and application delivery. Because Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) data can be freely downloaded from Esri's web site, this project used them to represent the street network of the City. The TIGER data contained street address ranges by which pavement conditions were mapped onto the corresponding streets.

The project used a group of spatial analysis functions for TIGER editing and refinement. Because original TIGER data were not accurate in representing real road segments, they often caused inconsistency between pavement segments in the survey and TIGER segments. A technical effort was taken in this project to solve this type of conflation problem. The effort involved merging TIGER segments manually to match pavement segments. Figure 4 shows the merging process.

The hot-linking utilities provided in ArcView were extensively used in the project. Pictures showing actual pavement conditions were hot-linked to their associated road segments. Figure 5 shows a thematic map that highlights road ratings and an image that is hot-linked to its associated segment.

Mapping of pavement conditions onto a street network is a challenge in a city-level agency due to its lack of GIS expertise and exposures. This project demonstrates a simple way of using GIS technology for the pavement condition mapping and visualization. More importantly, the project helps the City of Montclair consider GIS solutions to pavement management problems.
 

Project #3     An Interactive Mapping System for Cal Poly Pomona

This project was initiated to provide the Facilities Department of Cal Poly Pomona with a prototype interactive GIS mapping system that shows floor plans of campus buildings. The system was aimed at assisting people in the Facilities Department in managing the inventories of university facilities in an efficient and interactive manner. The system used Avenue programs and the Dialog Designer extension to develop a group of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) that help the users search for a specific building and display its floor plans. In addition, the system employed customized GIS functions to integrate with Cal Poly Pomona's Web services. Figure 6 shows the interface designed for the display of detail floor plans of the College of Engineering building. A reference to Cal Poly Pomona's home page shown in the figure allows the users to access information provided in the page.

There were two challenges involved in the project. The first challenge was to prepare the student who did the project with advanced GIS techniques such as Avenue and Dialog Designer. Although these advanced techniques were required for the project, they could not be taught in class due to limited time allowed. Instead, the instructor provided the student with GIS tutorials that were useful for the project implementation. With strong and clear interests in the project, the student was able to learn the advanced GIS technologies very quickly.

The second challenge involved the collection and preparation of data needed for the project. The student, in working with people in the University's Center of GIS for Research (CGISR) and the Facility Department, acquired digital floor plans and campus aerial photos and created data items about the University's buildings. Additionally the student used GIS functions to successfully deal with issues such as coordinate system projections, CAD data conversion, and image data processing.

It was found from this project that students were strongly interested in learning not only the fundamentals of GIS technology, but also the advanced topics such as Avenue, MapObjects, and GIS-Web integration. The application-oriented teaching approach provided students with a "learning by doing" environment. This project demonstrates the effectiveness of introducing students to advanced GIS technologies on a request basis.
 
 

CONCLUSIONS

This paper presents an application-oriented teaching approach that incorporates student's working experiences into GIS education. This approach considers the strong needs of undergraduate students at Cal Poly Pomona in applying GIS technologies in their workplace. It first provides an interactive learning environment to allow students to expand their GIS exposure. It then helps students initiate and implement their project that can improve their job performance at their workplace. In preparing students for accomplishing their projects, the approach requires the instructor to organize and discuss the GIS technologies that are needed for the projects.

The approach was found to provide a much broader learning experience than could otherwise be achieved if only a GIS project was examined by students. Furthermore, the student class projects demonstrated in this paper also show that incorporation of student's needs into GIS education is a way to strengthen and broaden student's interests in proactive learning. Because the projects are accomplished based on the real-world data from students' workplace, they provide valuable observations, findings, analysis results and suggestions that can benefit the workplace. In conclusion, the teaching approach is a good premier for GIS education. As a result students are better prepared when they undertake their job in managing spatial information about civil facilities.  Additionally these projects develop industry recognization of the Cal Poly Pomona GIS program.
 
 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are grateful to Robert Lemon, Hector Moreno, and Tamer Elsayed for their contributions and assistance in providing GIS projects on which this paper is based.  The authors also would like to thank Ronald L. Carlyle of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona for his valuable comments on the paper.
 
 

REFERENCES
 

    1.    Andy Mitchell (1998). Zeroing In. Esri Inc. Redlands, California
    2.    Esri (1996). Getting to Know ArcView GIS. GeoInformation International, Cambridge, MA.
    3.    Steven P. French and Xudong Jia (1997). Estimating Societal Impacts of Infrastructure Damage with GIS.
           Journal of URISA, Vol. 9 Number 1, 1997
    4.    Robert Lemon and Xudong Jia (2000). GIS Zeroing In: Yorba Linda Water District Experience,
           at the Twentieth Annual Esri International User Conference, June 26 - 30, 2000, San Diego, California.
    5.    Robert Lemon (1999). Preliminary GIS Pilot Study for Yorba Linda Water District. Department of Civil
           Engineering, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
    6.    Tamer Elsayed (1999). Pavement Management System for the City of Montclair. Department of Civil
           Engineering, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
    7.    Hector Moreno (1999). Interactive Visual Mapping of Cal Poly Pomona. Department of Civil Engineering,
           California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
 
 

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Xudong Jia, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Civil Engineering
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Pomona, CA 91768
Phone: 909-869-4312 Fax: 909-869-4342
Email: xjia@csupomona.edu

Cheryl L. Hickam
Director
Center of GIS for Research
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Pomona, CA, 91768
Phone: 909-869-4575 Fax: 909-869-4858
Email: clhickam@csupomona.edu