The City of Vancouver
 3rd Largest City in Canada
 Home of the 2010 Winter Olympics and
Paralympics
 Population 580,000
 Over 2,000,000 in Greater Vancouver
area
 Covers 113 sq. kilometers. 44 sq. miles

Engineering Department
 Plan, build, improve, manage, and maintain the following
services in accordance with policies set by City Council:
– Water supply and distribution
– Sewerage and drainage
– Utility corridor management
– Street lighting and traffic signals
– City communications system
– Streets, lanes, boulevards, sidewalks, and bridges
– Solid waste reduction, refuse collection, disposal, and
street cleaning
– Transportation

In the beginning….
 GIS system in the early 1990’s had rudimentary
tools to extract line work into CADD format
 Process had many steps, was rather clunky, and
only a few of the design branches bought in.
 As a result CADD files began to pile up in local
drives
 Data within was of little value to the rest of the
organization.
 Efforts made to develop a GIS interface to our
CADD system

And then we created….
 In the late 1990’s the City created a dedicated
CADD Server
 CADD Server stored base files that had been
generated from the GIS system
 Made use of drawing templates that ensured
that individual designers shared common
libraries and a common coordinate system
 The base files were static files updated from GIS
on a scheduled basis (often monthly).

Ground vs. Grid (1)
 Streets Division began using Total Stations
to collect survey data and generate
electronic field books.
 Data was downloaded and cleaned up and
passed on to the designers
 Conflicts arose with our Land Survey
Branch who were managing the GIS
cadastral base in grid units

Ground vs. Grid (2)
 Decision made to build a CADD-based
repository for these files
 In time some of the data was translated to
allow it to be overlaid on the GIS data.

Design to Construction (1)
 In 2002 moved our GIS data into an
spatially enabled GIS database
 CADD users and GIS users could connect to
the geo-database and query the data into a
CADD file
 Ensured that a designer would get the
most up-to-date background data for their
new design

Design to Construction (2)
 Design printed out and sent to Operations
who constructed the new infrastructure
 Field changes manually tracked and passed
to office staff for entry into GIS
 Not every change made it back into the
GIS!

PSAB & Asset Management
 Began implementation of Enterprise Asset
Management in 2007
 In part in response to PSAB 3150
 City acquired new GIS tools in 2008 to
support Asset Management Strategy
 Asset must be created first in GIS before
the work order to construct the asset can
be issued
 Design-based GIS using concept of jobs

CADD DESIGN
GIS
ASSET MANAGEMENT

Key Points for CADD/GIS Integration
 Get the data into a central repository that
is accessible to both your CADD and GIS
tools
 Leverage web mapping solutions as an
alternative to costly CADD packages
 Limit the number of data ‘handoffs’
particularly during design phase
 There is no ‘single solution’
 Business process may need to change

Thanks for attending!
Martin Tilt
GIS Analyst
City of Vancouver Engineering
martin.tilt@vancouver.ca