Pole and Pole Attachment Asset Management Solution

In 2010, geographIT^®, a division of EBA Engineering, Inc., developed a custom Windows Mobile GIS app for the City of Philadelphia to support a citywide traffic light LED bulb replacement program involving the replacement of 87,000 incandescent bulbs for energy savings and operating cost reduction. The handheld solution enabled field crews to add and update the City’s GIS inventory of traffic and street light poles and pole attachments. The app included a bar code scanner to quickly add LED bulb records with minimum data entry. This app was featured on the front page of the Spring 2011 issue of ArcNews magazine. The Streets Department also received a 2010-2011 Technology Solutions Award from the Public Technology Institute for this innovative mobile GIS solution.

This mobile GIS app served the City well for six years, but advances in smart phone and tablet technology and 4-G cellular broadband networks now support live GIS edits directly from the field. So, in 2016, geographIT rewrote the mobile pole and pole attachment app as a native Android app that runs online when connected via cellular broadband and offline when the signal is weak or unavailable. The new app streamlines the asset inventory and update workflow significantly by taking advantage of the latest mobile computing technology. Pole attachments are assigned the pole’s unique identifier and managed in related tables.

The native mobile app was developed with Esri’s ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Android 10.2.8 and is deployed on tablets running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) – 6.0.1 (Marshmallow).