Dave Lawless, Steve Bourgeois

City of Aurora

Automatic Location Tracking System (ALTS) Pilot

Abstract

Developed by Lockheed Martin and implemented as a pilot program with the City of Aurora, Colorado, ALTS combines speech recognition software and Global Position System (GPS) with Esri's ArcView geographic information system (GIS) product. ALTS cost effectively locates and rapidly captures attribute data into the GIS. ALTS provides tracking of City vehicles for location as well as route planning. Location and status of street signage and striping, potholes, and other maintenance items are monitored and managed using the tools offered by ALTS. Reports, work orders and other items are automatically generated. The City is able to monitor and quickly update infrastructure continuously and accurately.

The system gives the City the ability to create a geographic database which provides a complete picture of the City's current infrastructure condition. As the inspector travels an inspection route, potholes, downed street signs, sidewalk damage, street centerline information and many others are spoken into a headset microphone. The system records the location and the observations and plots detailed attribute data onto the GIS basemap. ALTS provides low cost data capture and automatic population of GIS. The City is able to initiate a proactive strategy for dealing with street maintenance and neighborhoods code violations before they become a serious problem. As a decision support tool, it moves the benefits of GIS up from the MIS backroom to the front lines. "ALTS is the City's early warning system."

Body of Paper

A central function of most large municipalities is the management of assets. These assets take the form of city vehicles, roads, sidewalks, street lights, signage, utilities, parks and many others. In large measure, a municipality's effectiveness can be directly tied to how efficiently it controls and manages the public's assets for the public's well-being.

The City of Aurora has approximately 250,000 citizens located adjacent to Denver, and Colorado continues to expand both in geographic service delivery area and in population. The City has a 280 square mile planning area and is the third largest city in Colorado. A 3.75 percent sales tax provides the majority of the $133 million annually operations budget. A portion of this budget is used to maintain the 840 miles of streets and 1650 miles of concrete networks as well as 1620 miles of underground infrastructure. The infrastructure ranges from early 1900's to present day. The City continues to grow at approximately 1000 single family units per year. There are approximately 6500 businesses employing 86,000 people. The economy is growing at a steady rate, although there is increasing competition from new developments south of Aurora in Douglas County, the fastest growing county in the United States. It is essential to monitor the health of the economy and improve City services without raising cost to continue to attract new business. Increasing demands on the City requires tools to rapidly identify service needs and efficiently manage requests for those services.

The ALTS system was recognized early as a tool to meet the increasing demands on City services without increasing the workforce. The City also realized that as it continues to grow, the need to capture data and map new infrastructure grows as well. A method to quickly and inexpensively produce accurate fully attributed data layers for the GIS is essential. Lockheed Martin realized the benefit of working with the City to solve real world problems in developing its commercial product.

Developed by Lockheed Martin and implemented by the City of Aurora, ALTS combines GPS satellites and a GIS. Using speech recognition software to capture data in the field, a turn key system is created to cost effectively locate and capture information onto the GIS. Location of city vehicles, status of county code violations, street signage and striping, location of potholes and other maintenance items are monitored and managed using the tools offered by ALTS.

The ALTS system uses a dash mounted or backpack unit that contains a GPS receiver, speech recognition and communication software. As the driver travels an inspection route, observations are spoken into a headset using specific keywords. A typical entry would entail the driver saying, "streetsign, down, left". Back at the basestation, in the course of a few minutes, ALTS electronically transfers the location of the observations and creates a detailed fully attributed data theme from an inspection tour.

ALTS automatically populates the GIS with field inspection data to rapidly build GIS layers for informed decisions. Over 80 percent of the cost of a GIS is populating the GIS with data. The ALTS system drastically reduces the cost of GIS data capture. The analysis tool box brings the benefits of GIS to the desktop for front-line users. Maintenance planning, report generation, work orders, and violation notices are now done more effectively by city personnel accessing the data they need when they need it using ALTS.

ALTS uses several key technologies to accomplish its functionality. They are:

· GPS: A system of government-managed satellites that broadcasts position data that any GPS receiver can use to determine location of the user to varying degrees of accuracy. DGPS is Differential GPS and refers to using a reference site, with accurately known location, to correct other GPS receivers in the field. This approach can easily improve accuracy to under 1 meter in error. ALTS uses GPS and DGPS to obtain location information on vehicles and inspectors.

· GIS: Database management system for maintaining geographically oriented data. GISs often provide graphical and analytical tools to review and exploit the data stored in their data base. ALTS uses ArcView GIS to display location data, manage the inspection data and exploits the inherent GIS capabilities.

· Speech Recognition: A system for converting a person's speech input into words and commands in a computer. The speech can be either live or recorded. ALTS uses speech recognition to allow the inspector to have his/her hands and eyes free to observe the event or object and describe it directly into the computer. ALTS then correlates this speech input with time stamped GPS locations to get location and condition of the event/object.

· Mobile RF Data Communications: A system for transferring computer data between moving platforms, e.g., vehicle and home base. Police and Fire departments often use this kind of system for their mobile data terminals. ALTS uses mobile comms for transferring the location of vehicles, in real-time, back to the home base for display. ALTS also uses mobile comms to relay DGPS corrections and location information from the home base to the vehicle in the field.

Each of the above technologies are readily available today in the commercial market and are also now mature enough to be highly reliable. This enables ALTS to use their capabilities at low risk and with affordable costs.

The system has two basic elements--the central station and any number of mobile units (Figure 1). The base station is an integrated command and control system with a GIS sub-element and DBMS to accurately tracks vehicles in the field and processes information that the vehicles collect. The mobile unit consists of a GPS receiver and processor integrated into a hardened box. The speech recognition allows short phrases to be spoken into a microphone for rapid data capture in the field.

Figure 1 ALTS Architecture