Department of Telecommunications is providing services to about
three lakhs and odd subscribers in Ahmedabad City and this demand will go on
increasing with more and more people gaining awareness of the benefits of being
connected telephonically. The Ahmedabad Telecom area is divided into thirteen
telephone exchanges and a subscriber is attached to one of the several
exchanges. The telecommunications services have been computerised since about a
decade and all this information is maintained in tabular form. The spatial
information is being maintained in carefully hand drawn maps which are of
several levels/kinds and innumerable. Whenever any changes are to be made in the
telephone cables like diverting a telephone cable to another nearby pillar or
erecting a new pillar, a lot of time is wasted in drawing the new maps or
updating the already drawn maps. The personnel of the telephone department also
have to take into consideration the existing telephone facilities that have been
laid down i.e. they have to have the tabular information alongside while
planning such changes. Hence, a need has been felt to explore the possibility of
transferring the map information in digital format and to design and develop a
software package to provide query based access using the available technology of
GIS; where the spatial and non-spatial data could reside under a common
umbrella. This study will help in exploring if the telecommunications services
could be made more efficient in terms of rendering services – existing and
futuristic, and gaining more visibility to the planning issues faced by the
telecommunications department with a view to increase the efficiency, which
would ultimately lead to increase in the customer satisfaction.
In order
to develop an approach, conceptualize the design and to examine the utility of
the study it has been decided to consider Vastrapur Exchange Area, which is a
suburb in western part of Ahmedabad as the pilot project area.
It is
well understood that the personnel of Department of Telecommunications(DOT) need
not be burdened with understanding the jargons and the intricacies of GIS
technology. Hence, a user-friendly package is being designed and developed which
will guide the technical personnel of DOT right from database creation, linking
of spatial and non-spatial data, generating the required network coverage and
querying different data to satisfy their management requirements. The customized
package is being developed using Arc/Info GIS and Visual C++ on a windows NT
platform. This paper provides the information on the design concepts and the
functionality of the package.
Approach
BackgroundThe
Vastrapur exchange area lies to extreme west in Ahmedabad Telephone Exchange
area. At present the Vastrapur telephone Exchange caters service to more than
20,000 subscribers. Two main distribution frames (MDF) are situated at the
Vastrapur telephone exchange. About 22 pairs of leading-in (LI) cables each
having different capacities are laid down from the MDF in telephone exchange
premises. Each primary cable from the MDF in the telephone exchange, extend to
one or gets distributed in two or more pillars. The distribution cables
originate from individual pillar and terminate into a number of distribution
points (DPs). These DPs extend connections to individual subscribers. Thus a
telephone call is received and sent through the network of MDF, primary cables,
pillars, distributions cables, distribution points overhead cables to the
subscriber as shown in Figure 1. Also it is mandatory to lay down the primary
cables and pillars on public property only.
ObjectivesConsidering the above given facts and considering
the requirements it was worked out that the prime objective of this study would
be:
- better handling of the map and attribute data and faster updating of spatial
information
- estimate length and direction of cable network from one point to another
point on the network for the existing cable network.
- draw the route of a given lead-in cable and the associated pillars on the
map.
- optimize cable network along the roads and estimate the length of the cable
to be laid down.
- indicate number of working tags, waiting tags, utilized tags and percentage
of filled tags in the pillars from time to time.
- suggest new locations for erection of pillars for cable expansion
- generate fault/performance reports for lead-in cables, pillars and
distribution points.
Database Organization
The database consists of spatial and non-spatial
component. The spatial component includes coverages like road, the locality map
depicting the major localities of Vastrapur area to serve as reference coverage,
primary cable coverage and Pillar location coverage. The non-spatial component
consists of subscriber’s list( which includes detail of name, address, the
associated pillar and the distribution point and his address in MDF), pillar
utilization data from time to time (this is being updated every quarter by the
telephone department), primary cable data with details on size, weight, tags
etc. The spatial and non-spatial data have been appropriately linked to generate
the required information.
Methodology
The above mentioned data
was received from the department of telecommunications. The maps are available
at 1:8000 scale. [Recently, we have also received locality map at 1:2400
surveyed and digitised by M/S. Setu of Ahmedabad, which will be replaced by
1:8000 scale in near future]. These maps were digitized, corrected and topology
built where required. The methodology of database creation has been represented
as figure 2. In order to work out optimal planning of cables a cable network
model and a road network model has been developed in GIS environment. The
modules which have been used from the Arc/Info are mainly the ARCEDIT, ARCPLOT
which includes the NETWORK module.