Abstract

Saudi Aramco's Land Encroachment Survey Using High-Precision Mobile GIS Technology
Track: Technology
Authors: Yousif Alghamdi, Saleem Raja Haja

Saudi Arabian Oil Company's (Saudi Aramco) vast land reservations and pipeline corridors across Saudi Arabia entail a land management process to monitor and survey inevitable land encroachments. This process has to be accurate, proactive, and as automated as possible for it to be effective and efficient. With today's advances in mobile GIS technology and satellite-imagery change detection, technology integration - of high precision surveying sensors, GIS databases with detected land encroachment data, and field computers - has proven to be the right approach for this survey process. Saudi Aramco has successfully implemented a land encroachment survey process that utilizes a centimeter-level accurate mobile GIS system - based on Leica Geosystem's MobileMatriX technology - to feed Enterprise GIS with up-to-date land encroachment information. The mobile GIS system is used by the surveyors to update the geometry and attributes of potential encroachment polygons. These potential polygons result from a periodic change detection process, based on high resolution satellite imagery for several monitoring areas. Custom-developed tools for the system include attributes collection; project management; data synchronization; quality checking; and the creation of image tiles for the encroachment polygons. The objective of this paper is to describe the implemented mobile GIS system for land encroachment survey while highlighting its benefits.