Pipe Alignment Tool

Andrew Liese, Dave Ponting, Alana Duncker

Yara Valley Water in Melbourne needed a strategic wastewater plan to extend their networks to over 7,000 high-risk properties that were not serviced by the existing infrastructure. To route pipes from individual parcels to existing pipelines, this extension must consider the topology of Yara Valley as well as soil survey data. Additionally, gravity pipes must be prioritised over pressure where possible.

Traditionally, engineers would manually:

• Plan potential routes,
  
  
• Check the elevation data and path viability,
  
  
• Identify the pipe requirements based on surface gradient, soil type, and parcels serviced by it.

Our team at Stantec developed an innovative solution involving automation and graph theory by building a connected network of all possible pipe locations based around the existing road network and resolving this into a final design through and interactively collaborative lowest cost algorithm. 

Though this approach relied on engineering judgement to review and correct the cases not identified and resolved through the development of this tool, the automated process saves weeks’ worth of work and can be applied internationally.