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Southern Rural Water (SRW) is responsible for designing and installing approximately 4,000 meters across Victoria under the Water Metering Program. The 4,000 meters will be installed to record water diverted from all significant ground and surface water resources. The design stage for this project will require extensive field surveys. In the past, this type of project would have used and created hard copy documentation making project management, procurement, and monitoring time consuming for all concerned. A major challenge for geographically dispersed organisations, like SRW, is how project information is routinely collected, verified and integrated with the organisation’s other corporate systems.

To assist with this project, SRW contracted Spatial Vision to design and develop ATLAAS, a mobile application for field staff to plan and record meter installations including not only their location, but also a range of textual data and even sketches.

The ATLAAS field application also synchronises with corporate databases allowing project managers to streamline resource tracking, meter procurement and installation, and program reporting.

Spatial Vision designed the system architecture to accommodate a number of disparate technologies and ability to incorporate data sourced from several corporate databases as well as GIS and GPS input. The sophisticated mobile application presents the user with extensive data fields for verification and update that are logically grouped by tabs. The functionality includes the capability to interface to MS Visio so the users can create drawings of farm practices and meter designs. Each object on the meter drawing is written to the database to support reporting on parts and costs.

The application was developed using C# in the .NET framework as well as the ArcPad developers kit. The application is designed to run on a toughened Windows XP Tablet.

A significant outcome from the project is the digital records of planned and installed meters recorded as assets linked to SRW’s corporate GIS and databases.