Teaching Geographic Information Systems In Civil Engineering ...

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Aug 2, 2011 ... Civil Engineering Technology program at. Pennsylvania College of Technology em- phasizing surveying, we think GIS pro- vides an excellent ...
ABSTRACT

Teaching Geographic Information Systems In Civil Engineering/Surveying Technology Curricula William H. Sprinsky Professor

Pennsylvania College of Technology Williamsport, Pa 17701

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are becoming the norm in engineering, designing and building activities. In the Civil Engineering Technology program at Pennsylvania College of Technology emphasizing surveying, we think GIS provides an excellent example of the use of some basic tools. We teach the GIS "tool" during the second semester, in CET122, Topographic Drawing and Cartography, using Intergraph because of its flexibility in acceptance of data in a number of differing formats. First, we used a part of a municipal database from Knoxville, TN, that supports a project to widen a downtown street, for which there is a unique solution. Students were told one of their clients would like to take advantage of the increased traffic flow from the road widening by opening a convenience market of about 1.25 acres in size, in downtown Knoxville. A number of different criteria govern the choice of site. Students realize that there is no unique answer to this set of conditions. They must use judgment to identify possible solutions, rate the solutions against the criteria, such as space and cost, and then justify a first and second choice to the developer. KEYWORDS: GIS, surveying, mapping, education, civil engineering

INTRODUCTION Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are becoming the norm in engineering, designing and building activities. In surveying and civil engineering technology programs that emphasize surveying, GIS provides an excellent example of the use of a basic tool that extends the value of our surveying and civil engineering technology degrees. At Pennsylvania College of Technology, the portfolio of technical programs includes a two-year Civil Engineering Technology (CT) Program with an emphasis in surveying, a two-year Surveying Technology (SU) degree and a new four-year Civil Engineering Technology (BCT) degree emphasizing surveying. 82

The CT and SU Associate degree programs have been accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). A recent National Science Foundation (NSF (Ill)) grant allowed us to change the thrust of these programs by purchasing equipment, computers and software that support more modern approaches in civil engineering and surveying. The problem now facing the faculty as course designers is how to give each student not only theory but actual experi ence with the projects and equipment that are currently the "bread and butter" of civil engineering practice. We feel solutions to academic projects should be performed on modern equipment with techniques used in today's practice. In addition, the common student experience of "fragmentation" into course work specific to surveying, highway design and land use needs to be overcome. The intent is to demonstrate to students the improved synthesis/integration of multiple

source data through application of GIS technology. Above all, an understanding of how to use information and databases to find solutions for engineering and surveying problems is an instructional goal. GIS is used to facilitate this integration in course work in much the same way industry uses GIS in the workplace. The merger of information from different sources, such as surveying, GPS and photogrammetric activities, often in different formats, is the norm in civil engineering practice. To use these data on projects, students must understand the utility of ASCII and .DXF file formats. These are some of the keys to bridging the gap between data and software packages and between various packages. Such information is commonly used in the design of subdivisions, location of parks, design of transportation networks, and the husbandry of the environment. Labor-intensive practices, often used to integrate information from multiple government and private sources, are not competitive with

FIGURE 1. The study site of Great Albert Street in Nashville, Tennessee.

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FIGURE 2. Graphic portrayal of all plats within 200 feet ofthe centerline of Great Albert Street. this new technology. Integration of data using manual techniques previously measured in person-years can often be reduced to person-weeks. Most govern ment and private engineering entities have or are switching to GIS-based systems, and we must recognize and adapt to this trend . IMPLEMENTATION A first step in this integration process was to use Intergraph's Modular GIS Environment (MGE) as part of a mapping project performed by all students (Sprinsky, 1997). A student-constructed map, a by-product of a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) , coordinated in Pennsylvania State Plane (1983) North Zone 3701, is the unifying project of their first two-semester experience in surveying. Based on afterthe-fact comments of students, and on evaluation of their product as compared

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to previous student work, has been an unqualified success. The use of the GIS "tool" is presented during the student's second semester in a course (CET122 Topographic Drawing and Cartography) in which the use of other tools required in later courses is taught. Again, Intergraph is selected because of its flexibility in acceptance of data in a number of differing formats. We found that Intergraph provides tools and capabilities to utilize data from many sources. In addition to ASCII format, a civil engineering/surveying user can download data from many data collectors. Data and coordinates can be saved in a number of Intergraph formats, as well as .DWG and .DGN files. Since students are exposed to the use of a number of different CAD programs, Intergraph's CAD neutral access, allowing the same civil engineering/surveying tools to be used

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--------------------------------------------2301579.9200000 6376211 52.836991' FIGURE 3. Report of plats within 200 feet ofthe Centerline of Great Albert Street. Plat number, owner size and assessed value are shown for each . ():) (11

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FIGURE 4. Intergraph report Utility is used to create an ASCII file, later to be used as data for showing assessed value and plat number on D sized plots. on different CAD platforms, is also an ad· vantage to our instruction. In CET 122 students learn about the State Plane Coordinate System after be· ing introduced to Latitude/Longitude, Ge· odetic Datums and conformal map pro· jections. Concepts such as scale (point and nominal) and meridian convergence are covered , as well as transformations from geodetic to plane coordinates. Learning the use of GIS fits in conven· iently with other newly learned concepts. Probably most entry·level employees will be involved with construction and use of GIS before they are required to have any extensive knowledge of data· base manipulation . The Intergraph en· hancement makes these manipulations transparent to the user. Class discussions of database concepts, schemas and de· sign are theoretical.

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TEACHING GIS CONCEPTS THROUGH PROJECTS The use of the GIS tool is introduced to students by concentrating on the GIS concepts. Students' first practical intro· duction to GIS technology draws on the common problem of a classic civil engi· neering project: that is, widening a road in a built· up area . Forthis first project. we used an example of a part of a municipal database from Knoxville, Tennessee, that supports a project to widen a street named Ray Mears Bv (Sprinsky, 1997) (Fig. 1). For this project, students are reo quired to identify property owners to be notified and find that there is a unique so· lution, a specific set of plats that are within 150 feet of the centerline of the road to be widened . As a second project, students were told one of their clients

FIGURE 5. Plot of area to be used as work drawing to select the proposed area for the project. Numbers are plat designators, from report shown as Figure 4. would like to take advantage of the increased traffic flow from the road widening project by opening a small conven ience market complex, including a fast service grocery store and a one-hour dry cleaner plus parking for customers . The complex is to have an area of about 1.25 acres on Great Albert Street (named after our Dean), which runs approximately North and South at the west end of Ray Mears in downtown Knoxville. The client's criteria are:

dents are to prorate the cost ofthe land based on the area and assessed value of the property in their budget. d. The client prefers an east-facing exposure, but this is not a critical element of the design . It can be used to decide among equally valid design alternatives . e. The area to be built upon should have no streets running through it. f . Designs are to be chosen based first on lowest land costs.

a. The frontage of the market should be about 300 ft on Great Albert Street. b. The market entrance should be 200 feet or more from any intersection with Great Albert Street to avoid congestion in turning into the market. c. If design plans are to take any more than 10 percent of a property, the purchase of the entire property is to be budgeted. If less than 10 percent, stu-

Students first queried the database to locate "Great Albert St" (Fig . 1). They then queried the database to locate all plats within 200 ft of the centerline of Great Al bert Street. Figure 2 illustrates a graphic portrayal of the answer to the second query. By now, students realize that there is no unique answer to the set of conditions imposed . They must use judgment to

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FIGURE 6. The area around Great Albert Street, showing student choices one and two.

identify possible solutions, rate the solu tions against the criteria and then select a first and second best choice for presentation to the client. Students use Intergraph Analyst's re port writing utility to write and print out for subsequent use an ASCII file containing plat number, owner's name, plat size and assessed value (Fig. 3) . They use the same utility to write an ASCII file, later to be used as data, containing centroid State Plane Coordinate (northing and easting), as well as plat number and assessed value (Fig. 4). Students use either EDIT (DOS) or NOTEPAD (Windows) to remove headers, page control and column titles from the second report. They use that altered file as data for the DTM program that produces .DXF files. These .DXF files are imported into the Intergraph environment. The CAD file now shows the outlines ofthe plats answering the query and either the plat number or the assessed value at the centroid. Two " D" sized plots

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are produced with State Plane Coordinate grids, using the Intergraph Gridding enhancement. Figure 5 illustrates the plot with plat number and grid, for later use in measuring frontage and other coordinate related quantities. Students use paper templates, plani meters and the hard-copy report to sketch the possible locations of the shopping center. Once they have selected a number of possible solutions, they compare them to the criteria of the client and select the two " best" properties. The property corner coordinates for these choices are read from the State Plane Coordinate grid on the D sized p lots for these two selections. The corner coordinates are made into ASCII then .DXF files as previously described. After the .DXF files are imported into the Intergraph environment, stu dents do the linework and show their choices. Figure 6 represents one student's solution to this problem. Figure 7 enlarges the view of the Southwest sec-

FIGURE 7. An enlargement of the southwest corner of Figure 6, showing the student's choices for the project. tion of Figure 6. It illustrates the geographic location of first and second commercial site choices. A written report accompanies each student project, supporting the reasons for their decision making. In the report, each choice is compared to the client's criteria . It was the consensus of this class that plat number 9.21 with some additional property from adjacent plat 9.13 to attain the frontage required was the lowest cost solution. It met all the criteria except that it was not east facing. Most students selected plat number 9.21, even though it was considerably larger than the client wanted. The selection was based on lowest cost from assessed values in the database. Many students expressed concern that once we laid out the 1.25 area along Great Albert Street, the client would have no ingress or egress to the rest of the property in case the client desired to sell it. The consensus second choice (next lowest

cost) was plat 9.19 with some property from plat 9.20 to make up the frontage. This met all the client's requirements, including that it was east facing, but at considerable additional cost. SUMMARY After considerable wheel spinning and complaining about the vagueness of instructions, students got down to work and completed the assigned task. In doing so, they demonstrated an understanding of the application of a number of skills. These ranged from coordinate manipulation in the computer to use of planimeters. They also had to work with a wide range of data formats and packages, manipulating both input and output data to accomplish their task. More importantly, they saw a poorly defined project with no discrete answer. Working within limits, they overcame the vague-

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ness to define their recommended choices. They then had to submit a report supporting choices to their instructor, not known as an easy sell. One unexpected result from the exercise was student surprise at the variance in the cost per square foot of some ofthe properties chosen . Although in class we discussed what goes into an assessed value, other than land value, the students needed to see this for themselves. The exercise clearly did illustrate the point. They also realize how crude this procedure is, but understand that it represents a "first cut" at quantifying this kind of project, for which GIS is such a useful tool. This is but one of several projects our students create to use and understand the basics taught in this course and others. Not only do they gain an appreciation for modern techniques applied to civil engineering problems, they also understand the manipulation of data for use in a number of applications. These applications,

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made by different entities, using different termino logy, are all needed to produce the final project, in this case a recommen dation to the client. Emphasis on funda mentals equips students to perform these processes and others with the applications we use or with any others they will come across in what they call "the real world," employment upon graduation. REFERENCES Sprinsky, W. H., 1997, Surveying Education in the '90s-Something Old and Something New. ASEE Annua l Conference Proceedings, 1977. Alternatively, see ''http://www.pct.edu/ courses/wsprinsk/delos". Sprinsky, W. H., 1997, Geographic Information Systems- Educating the Civil Engineering User. Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on GIS in Higher Education , Chantilly VA, November 1997, http://www. ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/g ishe97 /prog ram_files/ papers/sprinsky/sprinsky.html, last accessed April 1, 1998. Alternatively, see '' http://www. pct.edu/cou rses/wspri nsk/gis" .