Florida Power & Light – Electrical Facilities Conversion, Miami (Dade County)

  • Some of the UGSL Vernon conversion centre staff posing around an IBM GFIS workstation.

  • S.B. Mah in UGSL office, Vernon, BC.

  • N. Sommers at an IBM GFIS workstation.

  • Some of the IBM GFIS digitizing work stations.

  • Discussing the results of quality control checks.

  • IBM DASD (Direct Access Storage Device) controller and tape drives in the computer room.

  • Digitizing electrical facilities.

  • B. Harkness at an IBM GFIS workstation.

  • IBM 4381 mainframe running Geographic Facilities Information System (GFIS) software.

  • L. Peterson digitizing at an IBM GFIS workstation.

  • Digitizing electrical facilities.

  • Round the clock production to meet schedule.

  • T. Proctor at a workstation.

  • Digitizing electrical facilities.

  • Overhead three phase transformer bank.

  • Overhead primary disconnect switch.

Date

1992-1993

Sector
Historical Projects, Infrastructure
Services & Technologies
CAD & Digital Modeling, Vancouver Office
About This Project

In 1992 and 1993, UGSL—along with Field Data Services, Inc. (FDSI) of Denver, Colorado—worked on the Florida Power & Light (FPL) Facilities Graphic Management System (FGMS) data conversion project. This IBM GFIS project involved the conversion of primary electrical facilities on 459 map sheets covering an area of 1,000 square miles representing the populated portion of Dade County (Miami), Florida. Part of the conversion process involved verifying positions of facilities which had been imported from an existing database. These facilities had been roughly geographically located on a grid system. The area contained approximately 800,000 customers and 490,000 cadastral parcels.

FPL’s content, or factual, error rate for the electrical facility files was 0.1 percent. Positional error for field located facilities was not to exceed five feet at a 90% confidence level. Underhill, along with FDSI, met or exceeded these specifications in all deliveries.

Underhill’s involvement:

  • provided field data migration, text merging and customized data checking routines and procedures to ensure network connectivity,
  • developed field data collection methodology specific to FPL’s electrical data specifications,
  • performed the electrical data conversion, and
  • provided custom graphic data translation from ARC/INFO to IBM GFIS.

Underhill’s translation software was used to convert FPL’s land base (supplied by another conversion vendor in ESRI ASCII format) to IBM IFF. This data was used to then provide geographic referencing for converting electrical facilities. The Underhill software worked quickly and ran on a standard 640K microcomputer. The translator, written in C, produced attribute and graphic IFF records for topographical and cadastral features, building symbols and outlines, map borders and power poles.

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