Utilities

Thames Water

Tools Used:
Autodesk VISION*® software, Orbix™, Visual Basic, C and C++, Netscape Enterprise Server, CORBA®, IBM servers

Description:
Thames Water is a global specialist in water and wastewater operations, products and services. It is one of the world's largest water and wastewater companies, serving 12 million customers in London and across the Thames Valley. World-wide the company serves over 21 million people.

Problem: 
In 1997, Thames Water was using a mainframe system that was nearly ten years old. There were about 800 employees at Thames who depended on the system for their day-to-day work. It was difficult to modify this type of system because it was not component based. Thames wanted to move towards component independence with the ability to integrate their systems. Project Managers at Thames wanted to make it easy for people in the field, as well as on the customer service teams, to access data that they needed. Because the system was so old and it was not Y2K compliant, a redesign of the system was seen as a necessity.

Solution:
In 1998, the Eagle Project was started by Thames Water and Autodesk. The goal of the Eagle project was to change Thames' old system over to a new object-oriented Y2K compliant system. Thames preferred to have the ability to take down part of the system for maintenance without taking down the entire system. This was just one of the advantages of their choice of a component-based architecture.

A development team of thirty completed the system in under 16 months. It was built in phases to allow Thames to see results as soon as possible, while keeping in mind their Y2K deadlines. The three phases of the Eagle project were: basic GIS functions, increased data (query builders, spatial analysis, and schematic mapping) and ongoing additions to the system. 

Phase one introduced the infrastructure and put in the basic GIS function. It was completed in 7 months. Phase two introduced more functions and data. It began with the addition of query builders that were used to feed the information into questions using SQL. It also included a spatial analysis component that would query data based on location or position relative to other things. Finally, phase two included schematic mapping which allowed users to display visually, using colors based on attributes. The schematic mapping is extremely important to terrain evaluation. Phase two was started during the first part of 2000.

There are ongoing additions that are being made to the system. The next addition is meter reading functionality. This will be used in route planning for meter readers. The second addition, still in it's planning stages, is distribution of data to a mobile system. Thames expects that this functionality be fully operable by summer 2001, allowing their field workers to use a ruggedized PC tablet to communicate via a wireless network. 

From the beginning, CORBA was a requirement for Thames. They wanted high level integration as well as the benefit of reuse. CORBA offered those benefits, plus more. From Autodesk's perspective it enabled the deployment of a highly scaleable solution  that will allow future additions to the system. When users need to be added, all they will have to do is add new hardware.

According to John Bonner, information systems project manager for Thames, "Thames chose object technology because CORBA provided the only robust architecture for linking systems together. The new system is easy to use and has a much greater functionality than the previous system."

Currently the system is run on PCs and stand alone browser based GIS's. There are about 1000 people using the system and over 55 user sites involved in the system.