A defacto spatial manager

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to lead a team responsible for designing a complex inside and outside plant network in a massive oil and gas precinct. It had over 120 buildings and more than 30 networked systems.

We were tasked with using CAD (Computer Aided Design) and Office tools to design the comms and security solution for the precinct. And when I say security, not just network security, but building access control, number plate recognition, coast guard and even advanced RADAR amongst other things.

One of the cool aspects of the project was that it was more three-dimensional than a typical telco design. A telco cable network is usually planned on x and y coordinates because the y coordinate is usually on one or two planes (eg all ducts are at say 0.6m below ground level or all catenary wires between poles are at say 5m above ground). However, on this site, cable trays ran at all sorts of levels to run around critical gas processing infrastructure.

We actually proposed to implement a light-weight OSS for management of the network, including outside plant assets, due to the easy maintainability compared with CAD files. The customer’s existing CAD files may have been perfect when initially built / handed-over, but were nearly useless to us because of all the undocumented that had happened in the ensuing period. However, the customer was used to CAD files and wanted to stay with CAD files.

This led to another cool aspect of the project – we had to build out defacto OSS data models to capture and maintain the designs.

We modelled:

  • The support plane (trayway, ducts, sub-ducts, trenches, lead-ins, etc)
  • The physical connectivity plane (cables, splices, patch-panels, network termination points, physical ports, devices, etc)
  • The logical connectivity plane (circuits, system connectivity, asset utilisation, available capacity, etc)
  • Interconnection between these planes
  • Life-cycle change management

This definitely gave a better appreciation for the type of rules, variants and required data sets that reside under the hood of a typical OSS.

Have you ever had a non-OSS project that gave you a better appreciation / understanding of OSS?

I’m also curious. Have any of you used designed your physical network plane in three dimensions? With a custom or out-of-the-box tool?

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