QGIS as a Tool in Planning Optical Fiber Networks
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FOSS4G Europe 2024 Tartu101 / 156
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Hello, I'm Chris, or Christoph. Chris is just shorter, so let's keep it this way. I want to talk a little bit about how we used in Estonian Fiber where I worked before and also in my own company, Yellow Arrow, how we used QGIS in fiber planning. So not exactly like really the network planning per se, this is like happening in a
00:23
little bit different software, but we used it as a tool to generate a lot of outputs. Because you need to go to authorities to get approval for your network planning. So this was all happening between cooperation, basically between my company and Estonian Fiber where I was also working.
00:46
So Estonian Fiber is planning mainly fiber optic networks in Germany, or to be more precise in Saxony. This came to happen because of the cooperation we had with a company based in Leipzig and also in Chemlitz.
01:05
And from my side, I'm offering basically geospatial solutions and expertise to support them in their doings. So I think everyone has like an internet connection at home, like fiber cable probably.
01:21
This is just the future where to go. So you see like single fibers and they are like in cables and these cables are in ducts and basically the entire network is built on that. So like from a really small fiber which is basically as thick as your hair and this is where your internet comes from technically.
01:47
So as an example, I brought one project that I was still working on. It was located near Tresten in Saxony. And we have here like a network of local municipalities who wanted to
02:00
establish optical fiber network because there has not been anything conducted in that sense. So telecommunication in a form of copper cables were already in place but no optical fiber cable. So what we can see here is basically the overview of the network. We have like a trench network where the cables and the ducts are located.
02:26
And like the points that we see, these are basically distribution points from where the fibers go into each single house. So looking a bit more into detail, this is how it looks like on a slightly bigger scale.
02:42
So we are already like in the town and we can see like how the cables and ducts basically run through the streets. And we can also see for example like what kind of ducts we have like in the trench to put. So this looks already quite fancy. I mean nice map but you also have to keep in mind that a lot of input feeds into this planning process.
03:10
So you are not only dealing with the network that is generated based on a street network which can be used from open street map for example.
03:20
But you also have to take into account like nature protected areas especially if you are outside of urban areas. You have to take into account that you have water networks so you are crossing water bodies. Since we are like close to some cities we might have unexploded ordnance so there might be areas that you also need to consider.
03:46
And of course not to forget the other infrastructure that is in the ground. So all of these things you have to request, you have to put it into your system and then you have to analyze your network that was automatically generated.
04:02
But you still have to do a lot of like manual adjustments. This is just something that cannot be automated that much because you don't know all of these factors in advance yet. Certain areas you can technically avoid already but like the real planning like the network that we see here, this is already a lot of like manual adjustments that happen during that process.
04:28
So during this process making all these plannings and moving the trenches around to make this whole network like logical and working. So this is quite the iteration of different stages so you have to go back to
04:40
authorities, ask for feedback and basically you are in like a loop to improve the network. But once you go a little bit further in the planning and you need to go into the execution, you end there, bureaucracy. So you have to generate a lot of outputs, you have to fill out a lot of forms and unfortunately most of the authorities they are very much have a big love for paper maps.
05:13
So you still are obligated to generate also output that they can use. But overall the actually driving force to revolutionize a little bit the processes that we had was
05:25
that we just needed for bigger project areas generate output in bigger forms or in bigger volumes basically. So what we had already in place, it worked but it was actually really slow and the performance was not very good and static.
05:45
So we had a lot of like templates already in place but you already had to adjust basically every single page and this does not really make sense if you have like a really big project area. So and to give like an extreme example like you wanted to have like a bit of a form and some situation to show sometimes we just did that.
06:13
Cheap and dirty so you had an Excel document and you make a screenshot of your QGIS and yeah you just put it in as a picture.
06:22
We have had actually forms that were looking exactly like this and this is a very tedious work to go through that. Because you go back to QGIS if you need to change something you make a new screenshot then you go back to Excel and it just does not make sense. If it is like just 10 of these forms you can do it but if you do it for a large project
06:43
area and you have like hundreds of things then it is just not feasible and wise to keep on doing it that way. So what we actually wanted to achieve is you click one button and you generate an output with dozens of pages at once or maps.
07:04
So we have like here maps for different purposes like showing like high water risk areas where the network is located. Which is by the way for the network for the cables itself like high water is not the big deal because the cables are underground but if you put like a distribution point the cabinets in high water risk area that might just swim away when the flood is coming.
07:27
So how did we get there where we ended up? So talking a little bit about the architecture because what you need to understand first is how can you establish new workflows? But you need to know like your situation before that.
07:43
So the network is calculated in AutoCAD 3D and this has like a lot of plug-ins which are called NET. They are developed by a company in Chemnitz and they are really powerful tools. So they can calculate really detailed networks and you can basically track a fiber from your home to the distribution point where it comes from.
08:08
So you can display the entire distance and calculate links and do a lot of fancy stuff with that. So the architecture that we were working with was we have like a Postgres SQL database in the
08:21
background and we have like on this side basically the software that we do like the network adjustments with. But we also needed to have like an environment where we can generate inputs by going out with a tablet, collecting data and also like talk
08:40
with the client and show like what is actually happening without always producing a lot of maps and like going through this process over and over. So we had the GeoServer sitting in the middle and basically this was the connecting points to gain access via QGIS and basically it allowed us to simultaneously work in the AutoCAD environment but also in QGIS without
09:05
like duplicating any data because we are accessing still the same database and we could build up our processes on that. So as I said like this stuff was like developed by Tech IE and ChemNet and they have different tools like one tool is
09:25
net engineering which is really like for the execution planning but they also have like a different stage where you are in the initial design. And yeah, so this is like a normal AutoCAD environment but you see up here that there are some different plugins basically already in place.
09:43
So when we did all of these things then we definitely wanted to achieve that we have the flexibility to work like in both environments AutoCAD or QGIS so we had to ensure that this is like accessible from both sides. What we also noticed when we moved some of the processes to QGIS that some things work just a lot faster.
10:08
If it comes to like geo-referencing PDFs especially when you have infrastructure data and you need to digitize it this went a lot faster in QGIS than in AutoCAD. And then also like the actual network adjustments were also like a lot smoother in that sense.
10:25
And then of course if you go to this permission process then you just need like really quick produce like a lot of output. The initial idea was always like to not replace something we more wanted to give the possibility if someone feels
10:42
more comfortable doing like these kind of things like trench amendments in AutoCAD this is still possible and it's still happening. But other people were more like or having a preference for QGIS and they could do it in the same way basically. So no collision, no conflict so everything was actually working out smoothly.
11:03
And of course learning so if you establish like new workflows if you want to develop them further then I cannot emphasize that this is something that you have to really go through. And so let me put it this way it always started like with a question like why are we doing this?
11:25
Like why are we doing these steps like this over and over and over again without questioning the overall process? So and then if you ask around then I guess everyone has heard probably that answer here. We have always done it that way and yeah you just go along with that but that was not really my approach.
11:44
So I always started to question like these things that we had. But if you do yeah you have to fight so because this will cost a lot of like time your time to really develop yourself.
12:01
So learning these things you have to understand the structure, the network architecture and all of these things before you can actually really establish like these solutions that you want to. And then of course you have to convince people, you have to convince your supervisors, you have to convince the management and sometimes you get rejected.
12:25
But what do you do? You do it anyway and just see what happens and like thank me later kind of. Because if you really want to move forward this is the way. So to give you like a better example like what we were actually doing in like one particular case.
12:47
And I mentioned it earlier is water crossings. So whenever your network crosses a water body you need permission for that particular location. So again if you have like just 10 to 20 you can do it like the old fashioned way.
13:03
Make your Excel form and put a screenshot in but as we saw earlier we have quite a large network and you have hundreds of these crossings. And it's just not feasible to do it like this anymore. So again you have like different inputs that you have to consider.
13:24
There's on one side there is your network then you also have like external data sources like water network which you can retrieve from Saxony free of charge. So this data is open data and it's accessible. Then you also have like data collected on field trips through the web application.
13:45
So you have like pictures, you have measurements and so on and all of this needs to be basically turned into one layer or one data set that can be used later on to generate the output. And of course you don't want to do this like over and over again so you try
14:03
to simplify your life and also the life of your colleagues if they need to do it themselves. So you start developing models basically. So I'm really grateful for graphical modeler or model builder or model designer in QGIS.
14:24
I'm not a really strong programmer but I really love this that I can do it like visually with Lego pieces and put them together and connect them and still generate my output. So without like taking this geo process then doing this and doing this and doing this and you just like keep on going and you have to do it like every time again.
14:43
But you can save these models and integrate them in your project right away and then you can like reuse them. Like if you have a new project area you just identify the input or the parameters that you need and you click one button and you have basically your layer.
15:02
So basically what we have done is we have this layout and we had this layout already previously in AutoCAD. But I can already tell you that this was a lot of like handy work. Every drawing was like individual so when you have multiple crossings you just made another sheet, you made
15:23
copy paste and you changed a little bit some things and all these parameters and measurements and so on. This was so much manual work. Again it's just not really sustainable to do it like always like this in the same manner. And you can already see like yeah multiple tabs basically.
15:43
Insane to say the least. So basically what the approach was okay these crossings they always follow a certain scheme and the situations are quite similar. So we take all of that, throw out all the other crap and just keep the drawings blank and have them as templates.
16:05
And of course if you want to do this and you also want someone else to pick up your work and continue it, you have to document it. So how we did the documentation was basically describing every element and how it's linked to the database, where the data is retrieved from.
16:24
So I tried to make it really interactive, you just click on these elements and you know like which settings you have to do for example. Yeah with a lot of screenshots so these are just a few slides where I basically explained what every element in the layout view is doing and how it works.
16:43
But let's try to show this a little bit in real life. Oh I need to change this.
18:23
This is now in the system so we have our layer structure and we have our network which is here a little bit simplified because for the authorities they don't need to know like which exactly trench type or construction type is needed. So they only need to see the location for the actual crossings.
18:41
So if we look here into this area all these blue dots are water crossings so where the trench crosses the network. So you can already imagine that would be a lot of work to do that like piece by piece. So basically what we did is we used in the layout, basically we generated an atlas.
19:04
And what we did was basically the basic functionality that you have is you pick a layer which is identifying your atlas feature and then it's generating a series of maps. So in this sub area for example we have like 26 crossings but of course the overall project area is bigger with subdivision.
19:28
And we have all these different elements in here so for example here we have the actual drawing which is like a SVG file which is named after an ID like a crossing ID sitting in the background.
19:41
It's retrieved via the file name and depending on which crossing type it is it picks the file and displays it. So if we go through these things change, the map sometimes takes a bit longer.
20:04
And you can also see that down here the coordinates for example are changing. So it's really dynamic, it can be reproduced for different project areas and all the steps basically are
20:24
properly documented so for someone really to pick up the work and understand what is actually going on. So we have a lot of values in here that are retrieved from attribute tables. These attribute tables are enriched via relations, via joints so we can retrieve
20:41
all of this information and display it in different places all over the layout. So yeah, my name is Chris, that was a short introduction in how we utilize the system.
21:02
If you want to reach out to me you can write me an email, find me on LinkedIn. And I think we have time for some questions. Easy ones please. Thank you very much Chris. I think it was a really nice example to make in-depth use of QGIS functionality.
21:26
That was really nice questions. Thank you very much for the talk. You are using several data sources, probably with different accuracies, different reference systems.
21:47
The coordinates can be a problem because you cannot make a whole one meter, two meters apart. There's a different place in the street. Was that a real problem? The accuracy of the coordinates of the inputs you were using.
22:02
Okay, so for this purpose they need to know roughly where the location is, where it's crossing. But it's not only the coordinates that they need. Depending on how good they are, sometimes if they live with paper maps they are not looking up the coordinates. They want to know which parcel in which subdivision of that region is the crossing located.
22:23
So we give the coordinates because some authorities want to have it. But actually they are fine if you give the parcel information where the crossing is located. Hello, thank you for the presentation Chris. It was interesting that you resolved the problem to work with AutoCAD users.
22:47
I have a question from a similar fibro-optics problem but not the same. Have you dealt with or heard about solutions based on QGIS or maybe
23:01
some other open source tools that address the management of optical fiber splicing? Sorry. So when these cables must split from the main cable to the single houses and you must know the topological of the cables.
23:25
This is level 1 deeper and we are from EnviroSolutions in Poland and we are looking for solutions to solve that problem. Did you hear something about that? Thank you.
23:40
Ooh, tough one. So I have worked with the net software myself as well but it is capable of tracing back not only the fiber, it also shows you where the ducts and so on are split. You have a bundle, one duct splits out and you can see all of that. You can see it in the table version, you can see it in the map view.
24:08
Does that answer your question? I have a question. I think this is a very interesting use case of QGIS to manage Poland utilities infrastructure.
24:25
Just I have a question. How do you manage and share QGIS project file across organizations? Do you upload somewhere QGIS project file and the stuff download or maybe putting somewhere in file server to share master file or something?
24:44
Good question. We were working with SharePoint and the QGIS files were stored on SharePoint folders. Of course if someone accesses the same data with a database it is not an issue but if you have other local data then it generates copies accidentally.
25:04
So we try to put everything into the database basically. If you want to use this functionality as we did then what you need to achieve is that you work with internal variables in the QGIS like where is the project folder.
25:25
Because if you don't do this and you have for example these SVG drawings and you put only your path in it, your path does not work for your colleague. So you have to have this dynamic path in mind that you don't run into problems.
25:46
Ok. Then are there any more questions? We are hungry for lunch maybe. Then give another round of applause for Christoph.