India is witnessing a significant boom in the city gas network and recently held ninth CGD bidding round which offers to cover 174 districts, grouped in 86 geographical areas and spread across 22 Indian states and Union Territories is a testimony of this. With an objective to provide operators with a powerful and comprehensive gas distribution and pipeline specific data model, SmartGasNet solution is a set of geospatial business applications, tools and analysis that are designed to assist the operator's business processes. This solution specifies the project definitions, design, materials and equipment, welding, fabrication, installation, testing, operations and maintenance. It also offers to record customer connectivity within the network and attach relevant documents at appropriate indexes geospatially.
SmartGasNet comes with features such as network planning and mapping, asset planning and mapping, building Bill of Quantity (BOQ), construction management solutions, line and asset/equipment maintenance with alerts along with planned and unplanned outages management. During an outage, the solution offers to immediately identify the affected customers and send SMS to them.
The other offerings of SmartGasNet solution for the new projects include Web GIS Application, GeoDataBase for CGD networks, Hosted Web Server, Setup, Configuration and Maintenance Services along with optional services for new data collection and for existing network.
SmartGasNet has been designed keeping in view of the latest Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board notification which states that 'The entity operating a CGD network shall put in place a GIS (Geographical Information System) based system with the intention of capturing the entire underground gas network and customer database. This system shall include details of the entire pipe network. All the pipelines laid shall be identified in GIS through geo- referenced co-ordinates. All failures in the pipelines shall be mapped in GIS for investigations'.