Development and Programming – TYC GIS – GIS, Teledetección y Drones

Projects TYC GIS® | Inventory and green areas management plugin for the cities from Banco Santander

Rodrigo Arias Braun — Mon, 20 May 2024 15:02:56 +0000

In the same line as the urban inventory management plugins previously developed for the city hall of Pozuelo de Alarcón and Avilés, we have carried out a new work for inventory management, in this case it will be the botanical inventory of the Santander Bank in the cities of Pozuelo de Alarcón and Madrid.

Despite sharing a lot, this plugin requiered some modifications for the peculiarities of this inventory. We moved on to having fewer shapes, focusing only on general trees, olive trees, bushes, shrub thickets and grasslands. However, the data available for each shape, specially for olive trees and shrub thickets, required a complete reformulation of the data model.

The olive trees have a data model that distinguish them from the other trees, they have a name, date, and being all the elements of the same species, the classification of families and species, and the symbology asociated, had to be replaced. The customer also have pictures of the olive trees, and of other shapes too. To mantain the lightness of the data base and ensure the agile handling of the shapes, an action was introduced that enables the pictures to be opened in the web browser. This allows to make a fast query of the pictures, but avoids the problems that loading a hole shape of pictures may cause.

In the case of shrubs thickets, they are kept as polygonal entities, but we now face multispecies polygons, on which they can coexists up to three species. This required first a change in the logic of the data base, so it can adapt to the existence of several species and to guarantee the logical order of the species inside the table, preventing, for example, that that a species occupy the value of the third species, if there is no species in the place of the main species. A style was created that analyze the amount of species of each polygon and respects the symbology of the main species, but indicating that it is not the only species in that space.

Another innovation introduced, upon the customer request, was a species finder. In previous plugins, to find a species we had to chose first a family and inside it we chose the species. Now, although it can still be done this way, a finder was implemented that search among the species of all families if the family field is blank and can search for the species inside a specific family.

In additon to this innovations, the plugin maintains all the capabillities of the previous ones, giving the control for creation, removal and editing of entities for the “user” access level, user administration for the “admin” level and an additional “visitor” level that allows to make queries without the possibility of making changes in the data base.

Customer:

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Projects TYC GIS® | Plugin development for urban inventory in Avilés

TYC GIS — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 13:27:13 +0000

Some weeks ago, we talked about a project carried out for EULEN of a QGIS plugin for urban inventory management. This time, we have a new project for EULEN. On this ocassion, for the urban inventory management of Avilés.

It may seem that the elements a cityhall needs to inventory are always the same and sometimes very similar, yet they always have some pecularities and specific needs. That’s why having at our disposal an app created ad hoc for our specific case and needs is an advantage over a prefab software that may require us to adapt to it.

The Avilés plugin consist on 10 layers, 6 of them of lanscaping (tree, bush, green areas, flower massif, hedge massif, bush massif). These layers have their own field and symbology collection, specifically created for the representation needs of the customer data. On the other four layers (Inventoriable assets, Promenades, Fountains and Rolling mills and water sheets), the data base had to be adapted and a new symbology had to be created for the inventoriable assets, given the wide variety of the inventoried elements.

The plugin also has a user administration section that gives control of user administration to the customer. This allows them to create or erase users, as well as assigning and varying their roles. This way, we can vary someones role from a technician with acces to make changes on the elements into an administrator able to creat new users or revoke a workers acces to the data base if he or she leaves the position.

Another challenge in this kind of works is often the massive loading of data that was taken before the creation of the data model, as it does not always the created data model fits the older one or every data taken above adjust o it. Usually, you have to face a series of layers, excel tables or CSV, where the names of the fields change from one data source to other ones, some are incorrect or non-existant, etc. That’s why, during the data migration phase, we generate some data loading python scripts adjusted to the specific needs of the situation. We detect and correct systematic errors with nomenclatures, coding, wrong or missing data.

Once the data uploading is done, the customer inmediately began to inventory using a tablet with windows 10 in the field, which allowed to use QGIS. The performance was good, considering it was not designed to be used on a tablet, and has made it possible to carry out inventory work in the field with our plugin, which has been a great help in facilitating its execution.

Customer:

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Project | Shadow maps to improve working conditions on the streets

TYC GIS — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 10:52:24 +0000

It is no secret that Spain is, to a large extent, a place that enjoys long summers and many hours of sunshine. This creates enormous potential for sectors such as tourism, agriculture and electricity generation, but also creates problems in day-to-day life. It happens, for example, that thousands of workers have to carry out their work in the street and sometimes have to perform tasks under a blazing sun. This is why the company Rivamadrid, Rivas Vaciamadrid municipal services company, thought of designing routes that would minimize the sun exposure of its workers, thus improving their working conditions and reducing the risks involved in long days exposed to solar radiation and high temperatures. To achieve this, they needed to have information on which areas are in the shade at each hour of the day at each time of the year.

That’s where TYCGIS comes in. Could we generate maps with the projection of shadows on the streets every hour from sunrise to sunset? Yes, we can. To do this we need to know the coordinates of the place and calculate the relative position of the sun (Azimuth and solar or elevation angle) at each hour of the day for the days we will use. In this case we will use the first day of each month and there are numerous online tools for this, such as SunEarthTools, which gives us the data we need just by entering the coordinates, the time we want to consult and the time zone to which this time belongs (we might want to know what time Spanish sunrise is in Lima). To speed up the process and above all to gain flexibility, instead of using these resources, we developed a tool that allows us to obtain a JSON file with the elevations for as many time intervals for the days we need.

Now we need surface models (MDS), first we tried to use the MDS that the National Geographic Institute (IGN) makes publicly available in its download center. Unfortunately, the MDS available are models with a mesh pitch of 2.5 meters, which did not give us a good result, especially when calculating tree shadows. To improve this, we resorted to work directly on the LIDAR data and obtain our own models, using software such as LASTools and CloudCompare, we achieved models of Surfaces with and without trees for the differentiation of the winter months in which the deciduous trees do not cast as much shadow.

As a final result, we made a composition on a base map, where we superimpose a layer with the trees and another with the projected shadows. On these maps, routes can be traced trying to minimize the sun exposure of employees in the development of their work.

September 1st 9h:

September 1st 19h:

As an additional product to the initial purpose, insolation hours maps were also obtained for each day studied. In this case, a simple sum of the hours of insolation for each day was made for each pixel analyzed, but the study could be enriched with solar azimuth and climatic data if other indexes were desired for the calculation of the estimated incident energy for each point in an entire year, in an agricultural season, etc.

In the end, in TYCGIS, we are very used to carry out projects where GIS is used to increase performance from an economic perspective and it is very rewarding when you have the opportunity to do a job that directly affects the quality of life of people and see how you can also use geographic information systems to improve the lives of people, in this case enabling improvements in occupational safety and welfare at work.

Customers:

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Project | Field app development for agroforestry project in Zambia

TYC GIS — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 10:55:50 +0000

TYC GIS has developed for an international agribusiness company with a large presence in Africa,
a customized mobile application for field digitization of the plots of an agroforestry plantation project in Zambia for the generation of carbon credits.

This tool allows field technicians, from a mobile device, to identify in the database the farmers who have participated in the planting project, locate the field location, digitize the plot boundaries and add relevant field observations for the next phases of the project.

Prior to its use by the field technicians, training was conducted in the field for the correct use of the different functionalities of the application.

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Project | Plugins development for urban inventory

TYC GIS — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 15:54:34 +0000

Municipalities are custodians of a large number and variety of elements that make up the urban inventory.
Trees, hedges, benches, fountains,… it is very useful to have a geographic database where we can store these elements and their location.

Unfortunately, the management of a database of this style, operating directly on it, is quite cumbersome. To facilitate the task of adding, deleting and querying elements to the geographic database, it is particularly useful to have software that allows us to interact with the database in an intuitive way, viewing the elements in their geographic location.

Doing it with a map service would be very laborious and would make it very difficult to have a variety of geographic tools to work with the different layers in which the different elements are structured. Using, on the other hand, a plugin within a GIS software such as QGIS makes it easier to use all the vast collection of tools that this software makes available to us and, in addition, facilitates the development of the required application.

To meet the customer’s needs in the management of the urban inventory of the city council of Pozuelo de Alarcón, a Postgres/PostGIS geographic database was designed and for its management a QGIS Plugin was created that allows to load the elements as layers and apply filters making queries on the database interactively by means of forms, without the need to have knowledge of SQL language.

The plugin allows the loading of landscaping layers such as Trees, Shrubs, and Flowerbeds and other types of elements such as Fountains, water features, urban furniture, etc. Each one with its appropriate typology, just as a tree will be a point, a lawn area will be a polygon.

In addition to adding, deleting or modifying features of the elements, the plugin allows you to assign work orders to different elements. For example, we can set a date to paint a bench, assign an operator, include before and after photos of the action and send an email to the desired addresses when the work order is opened and when it is completed. In addition to assigning work orders to elements, we can also assign them to an entire area or create them without assigning them to any type of geographic entity.

Another feature of the plugin is that it allows the management of users with different levels of access from the plugin itself. Creating new users that can be administrators (full control), users (no control over users) or visitors (viewing permissions), deleting them or changing their level of access to the database.

In addition to the plugin, a first massive data load was performed for the tree layer with about 40,000 elements.

Customer:

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Project | Calculating system for health coverage and emergency access in the Trans-Pyrenees Region.

TYC GIS — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 11:44:03 +0000

In this project TYC GIS worked on the development of a web application for the analysis of health resources and their response capacity in the region under the European cross-border cooperation program POCTEFA.

The application consists of several tools to analyze the health resources of the region. It has a series of standard base layers, as well as vector business layers (events and health resources provided by the project partners).

By calculating transit times through the road network, the application calculates the evacuation times for an emergency at an arbitrary point and displays them on a map (IDW interpolation), allowing the response capacity of the emergency system to be evaluated.

It also has a tool to visualize the degree of health coverage based on requirements established by the user (number of ambulances, hospital beds, etc.), with a maximum access time to each resource. The areas on the map that meet the requirements are marked in a different color from those that do not, allowing a quick visualization of whether a region has an adequate emergency system in the event of, for example, the celebration of a large event.

The application has an online form under identified access, so that project partners can feed the system with data on events that require health planning.

Customer:

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Project | Mapsens® Agro | System for control and optimization of pruning/clearing works for oil wells

TYC GIS — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 11:40:39 +0000

In this project TYC GIS worked on the development of a system to control and optimize the pruning/clearing of 135 oil wells in the Castilla and Chichimene fields (Colombia) with Mapsens® Agro.

The work began with the generation of detailed orthoimages of the locations and a digitalization of the vegetated and built-up areas. From this point on, these areas have been analyzed monthly with multispectral satellites. Monthly measurements have also been taken to relate vegetation height/development with the photosynthetic activity value to generate a predictive model to help plan maintenance works.

All this information is loaded into Mapsens® Agro for consultation. To improve its analysis, specific functionalities have been developed: a well finder/locator, pruning indexes (growth, clearing and stable), vegetation height estimation function, and a summary table of the general status of each well with areas worked, evolution, etc.

Customer:

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Project | “LE CRET” web viewer of hydrogeological resources of Tunisia

TYC GIS — Thu, 16 May 2019 11:45:52 +0000

In this project TYC GIS worked on the development of a web viewer to visualize environmental data collected in a hydrogeological project of the Tunisian Ministry of Geology.

Areas such as geology, hydrology, precipitation, temperatures, groundwater, surveys or historical works are covered. Outside the database, rasters are stored and are also visualized by the application. The web allows opening PDF files and images associated with the records. Interactive elements were added to the map (entity query, selectable graphic scale, label creation, etc.) as well as customized query tools. The application has the ability to generate printed PDF maps from what the user is viewing, including active layers and legends.

The application has a user authentication system that protects all content. The accessible content depends on the user’s privileges over each thematic category. For those with an administrator role, a control panel has been enabled that allows users to consult, create, edit and delete users, as well as to have access to the application’s log history (who has done what operation and when).

Customer:

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Project | QGIS plugins for urban furniture management

TYC GIS — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 11:31:38 +0000

In this project TYC GIS worked on the development of a management system for urban furniture and actions for MARTOBAR, the contractor company with these competences in the city of Salamanca.

The system centralizes all the information in a database hosted in the cloud, and covers both street furniture data (sidewalks, roadways, stairs, railings, curbs, etc.) and information related to the company’s work teams (personnel, machinery, actions carried out, costs, etc.). QGIS plugins have been developed to manage the database in an easily accessible way, allowing both visualization and editing.

This includes customized tools to obtain calculations and analysis of the database. On the other hand, a web viewer has been developed with data query and layer visualization capabilities. This viewer is oriented to personnel external to the system management, so they do not have permissions to modify data.

Customer:

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