| NEARC 2001
Matthew Davis, Engineer GIS-Based Approaches for Wastewater Capacity Planning Abstract: Planning for adequate capacity in wastewater treatment and collection systems plays an important role in protecting public health and water resources from the effects of sewer overflows. Understanding current and future demands on collection and treatment systems is a crucial first step in the planning process. Recent advances in GIS-based wastewater forecasting have lead to the development of a Capacity Assurance Planning Environment (CAPE) for wastewater systems. CAPE provides a flexible environment for evaluating system capacity under a variety of conditions (e.g. varying population and employment growth rates, different rates of infiltration and inflow, different sewering strategies for on-site areas). CAPE streamlines compliance with many of the EPA CMOM program requirements. Previous approaches to wastewater forecasting had relied on shapefiles for geographic data. However, the multitude of geographic coverages required in wastewater calculations led to a number of difficulties which will be discussed. CAPE has overcome these difficulties by utilizing grid data (rasterized) rather than shapefile data (vectorized). This approach reduces the complexity of GIS-related tasks and simplifies model calculations. In addition to the wastewater industry, grid-based forecasting has application to other fields such as water and power supply. CAPE was developed using MapObjects 2.0 and Visual Basic 6.0. |