The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MOTI) manages the highways, bridges, and a large subset of the roads for the province of British Columbia. This includes planning, procurement and execution of upgrades and maintenance of the transportation system. MOTI is undergoing a strategic realignment and modernization of its approach to how it manages its infrastructure and services through data and applications. The Spatial Data Strategy will be looking at data and applications from an organizational perspective. To achieve this goal FME is being used as the integrative glue to bring systems and data together across the organization. This talk will detail the strategic goal and step through some high level examples of where FME was used to integrate large and complex sets of data from different ministries, regions and business areas into a common enterprise database, and then use FME to drive out a product for an upstream application.

1. Ministry of Transportation
and Infrastructure: Spatial
Data Strategy and FME
David van Blankenstein

2. Overview
- The Speaker
- The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure
- Spatial Data Strategy
- Applying the Strategy

3. Speaker
- David van Blankenstein
- Contracted by MoTI

4. About MoTI
The Ministry opens up B.C. through
• Innovative, forward-thinking transportation strategies that move people and goods safely and fuel
our provincial economy.
• Improvement of vital infrastructure is a key goal
• Enhancing the competitiveness of B.C.’s transportation industries
• Reducing transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions
• Providing B.C. with a safe and reliable highway system

5. About MoTI
- Plans and implements transportation networks
- Provides transportation services and infrastructure
- Develops and implements transportation policies
- Administers many related acts and regulations

8. Spatial Data Strategy
• to manage Ministry information as the valuable key asset that it is
• enhance quality, enable and simplify, share and integrate
across the ministry, government and the public
• Location is key to every activity of MoTI

9. Instantiating the Strategy
-Prove the two main thrusts of the strategy
- enhance quality, enable and simplify
- Standardize to a Common Road Base Map
-simplify, share and integrate
-Support for Automated Truck Permitting

10. Standardize the Road Base
• MoTI to Work from a Common Road Base
• Look to the Integrated Transportation Network (ITN)
• A familiar product of the ITN is the Digital Road Atlas
(DRA) for BC

11. GeoBC ITN
• ITN is the single, authoritative source for road data for the
Province of B.C
• Maintained by GeoBC through collaboration and input from
municipalities, regional districts, MoTI and other organizations.
• All demographic roads, resource roads, ferry routes, trails
• Evolving, improving in content and quality
• Address ranges, structures, lane counts and so much more.

15. GeoBC ITN
• For more information on the ITN
• http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/data/geographic-data-
services/topographic-data/roads

16. MoTI/ITN Integration
• Target Data Model developed to support the needs of MOTI
• Subset of the model contains the ITN
• Normalize the ITN (geodatabase)
• Load into MOTI model
• Lots of constraints meaning:
• Blocked workspace runners loading each component
• Nodes, Segments, Names, Relationship from Names to Segments
• Domain mapping between the ITN and the MOTI model

18. ITN/MoTI Integration
• MOTI needs to recreate the state of the road network at a given time
• ITN provides change logs
• Process deletes
• Process inserts
• Process updates
• Determine subnetworks that have encountered changes that result
in loss of primary key chain
• More on this later

20. Automated Routing and Permitting: onRouteBC
• onRouteBC allows commercial carriers to apply for permits and produce the
approved route.
• In many cases, the system can auto-approve and issue a permit to carriers
without ministry involvement.
• If a permit cannot be automatically approved carriers submit a permit
application using onRouteBC.
• onRouteBC is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, allowing carriers to
get permits, even when the Provincial Permit Centre is unavailable.

21. Automated Routing and Permitting: onRouteBC
• >130,000 permits last fiscal
• 55% or 71,500 permits required routing information
• More information at
• https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2016TRAN0268-001720

22. The Requirements
- Associate restrictions to the network
- Define a backbone
- Output a representation of road network to support
automated routing
- Not the shortest path. More to come.

23. Restrictions

24. Restrictions
- What is a restriction?
- A rule applied to a subset of a segment/lane of the road network due to a
physical or administrative constraint
- Static Restrictions
- Bridges, underpasses, overpasses, sign bridges etc.
- Dynamic Restrictions
- Floods, fires, police events
- Planned Restrictions
- Construction, special events

25. Restrictions
- Focus on static restrictions
- Dynamic and planned restrictions dealt with by router real time
- Restriction Types
- Height
- Width
- Weight

26. Restrictions
- Multiple systems maintain restrictions
- Fed in various formats
- FME used to
- Text match and infer location
- Use proximity to determine quality of match
- Some squinting at screens
- Road system is multi-jurisdictional
- End result is a relationship from the restriction to the segment in
MOTI

28. - At present neither the ITN nor
restriction management
applications support Z on geometry
- How do you avoid a route where a
truck makes a left turn onto a
highway mid point on an overpass
- Z levels …

32. Z-Levels
- Lets bring in FME again
- Have structure classification from ITN
- Supported by restrictions that identify structures
- Can’t automatically resolves Z levels
- Structural problem
- Data Quality Issues
- Detect likely Z crossings
- Some manual QA
- Bring in railways, pedestrian overpasses
- Exclusively in support of height restrictions
- Collaborate with GeoBC to reuse this information

34. - Initially ferry routes did not have much granularity
- Classified as a ferry route
- Rich classification is now available
- Routing engine could make the choice to turn from a major to minor ferry
route
- Initial solution
- Build overpasses at sea
- Make ferry routes pass over each other at intersections
- No longer needed but was a fun solution

36. Trucking Backbone
- Backbone network
- Want trucks to gravitate to the backbone
- Shortest path may result in impractical route (through residential neighbourhoods)
- Routing engine applies weights to the segments
- The backbone becomes low cost
- Generated routes direct trucks to backbone at earliest opportunity
- Backbone must be connected subnetwork of the ITN
- Any exceptions dealt with manually

37. Trucking Backbone
- Use FME and python to
- Select certain ITN segments by road class
- Highways, Secondary Roads, Feeders
- Do some stuff with ramps
- Determine if the resulting sub-network is connected
- Detect and QA missing segments
- A little bit more squinting at the screen

41. - The geography of BC results in many isolated sub-networks in the ITN
- Even when ferry routes are included
- Isolated watersheds with logging road networks
- Islands without ferry services
- Fun fact
- Currently 32,769 disjoint sub-networks in the ITN. No path between them
- This is 2^15-2 = 2^15 – 2^1
- 16 bit integer. Almost. Coincidence?

42. Trucking Backbone
- Notes on the backbone
- The Alaska highway is an exception
- It connects to the backbone out of the province (Yukon)
- Segment information from the Yukon amended to output
network
- Backbone is two disjoint sub-networks

43. Final Product
- Output the MOTI representation into a fully
vetted proprietary schema (ok, a geodatabase)
- Contains all of the ITN (excluding trails)
- Z levels and backbone defined
- Supports all of the information required to
support automated route generation

44. Outstanding Issue
- MOTI derived information such as Z Levels and Backbone
definition associated to the ITN through its primary key
- Sometimes during updates of the ITN into MOTI that relationship
is lost
- Detect and resolve after each update of the ITN into MOTI

45. Conclusions
-Using FME as the integrative glue the two main flanks of the strategy
where validated
- enhance quality, enable and simplify
- Standardized road base
-simplify, share and integrate
-Support for downstream Truck Permitting application

46. Questions?
Contact: dvb@forteconsulting.ca