FME World Tour UK – 13th May: Making Sewers Flow (Arup)

FME World Tour UK – 13th May: Making Sewers Flow (Arup)

Northern Ireland Water’s (NIW) data is heavily used by Arup’s Belfast water team in the decision-making process for identifying key areas for new drainage development in association with a number of projects. Tasks involved in this stage involved the identification and isolation of relevant stormwater collection networks, outfall locations and their respective culvert routes. In addition to this, each run within the extracted data needed to be given a unique identifier that related to its position within the network. These tasks were primarily completed manually, and network run IDs required constant updates as new developments altered the topology of the network.

Using the A2 Buncranna Road improvement as a case study, the development of an FME workbench began to automate these processes. The datasets are first processed to identify the collection networks and culvert routes along with their relevant outfall location based on a 30m proximity. This data is then sorted into networks and their associated culverts are identified based on the nearest outfall location. Using Horton’s stream order calculation these networks can be analysed to identify the main runs through analysing the topology of the network and assigning each run their own power. In order to provide each run with its own unique ID relating to its location within the network, each network’s topology is analysed again to identify junctions and rank these in order, moving away from the outfall. These rankings are then assigned to each run generating a unique id.