GIS Based Topological Modeling for Infrastructure Systems
Date
2010-06-08T17:43:33Z
Authors
Vankadara, Sriharsha
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Abstract
Today‟s society greatly depends on the operations of complex infrastructure networks such as transportation, utilities and telecommunication. While traditional modeling tools have provided an insight into the theoretical behavior of infrastructure networks, they lacked the ability to elucidate the spatial organization between multiple networks. Accurate modeling of infrastructure systems depends on integration of dependencies, spatial reliance and properties of each system. The purpose of this research is to develop a toolkit to model the spatial relationships between randomly generated infrastructure facilities using a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) based topological approach. Topology describes the geometric associations between infrastructure elements represented as point, line and polygon features. The objective is to generate realistic topological networks in the absence of spatially complete datasets that represent infrastructure networks. The toolkit is developed in Python making use of custom GIS libraries and comprises random topology generators for star, trunk and mesh shaped networks. The efficiency of the tools is tested by their ability to generate a water distribution topology from minimal spatial data to compare the created network with that of a reference distribution network.
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Keywords
Infrastructure, GIS, Topology, Networks, Tool kit