Best Practices for Mapping Rail Assets in Highly Urbanised Environments - A Case Study from the BART Network
(Room Sagamore 6)
19 Sep 17
10:30 AM
-
11:00 AM
Tracks:
AREMA Technical Sessions- P&T
Globally, rail owners and maintainers are benefiting from efficient mobile multi-sensor survey systems that deliver purposeful engineering survey data of rail tracks and corridors. In 2015, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) embarked on a ground breaking project to map assets across its entire network. The BART network presents significant challenges in mapping assets due to the extensive underground network where no GPS information is available. The approach taken required the use of multi-sensor surveying systems to create a contiguous three dimensional dataset of the BART network covering both surface and underground sections. The 3D imagery and LiDAR datasets of the BART network were recorded at normal travel speeds so that impacts on operations were minimized. Special workflows were then used to extract asset information across the network in the detail required for BART’s enterprise Geographic Information System (eGIS) and asset management systems. This paper will describe the project undertaken by Geomatic Technologies, BART and LTK Engineering discussing the methodologies and technologies used to address BART’s network requirements, best practices for data collection, data processing and data management, project risks and mitigations, as well as lessons learnt. The paper will also discuss how these high value datasets will be integrated with existing corporate systems to promote sharing across the business and to support BART’s day to day engineering and operational activities.