Introduction to using the Poles and Wires analytics

Pointerra's Poles and Wires analytics creates a digital twin of a power distribution/transmission network from your point cloud data. Using the extracted digital twin, a range of analysis tasks such as pole conflation, vegetation encroachment, ground clearance, etc, can be conducted on the asset. 

Network extraction initially runs as a fully automated process, and generally achieves a good first-pass extraction of a point cloud's features - however, as with any automated analytics, there will always be some level of false positives or missed features that need to be manually edited. After the editing and Q/A is completed, the analytics produces very detailed information and reports that can be downloaded for further analysis.

With Pointerra's new Utility Explorer application, the Poles and Wires analytics outputs for each point cloud can be combined with existing results to provide network-wide views of assets, vegetation encroachments and to perform assets inspection from photos.

A summary of the typical Poles and Wires analytics workflow is shown below.

The key steps in the process are:

1. Initial poles and wires analytics is run on the desired point cloud. For help with creating analytics jobs, click here.
2. The automatically generated analytics results are then viewed and edited using the Pointerra 3D viewer and tools.
3. Quality assurance is conducted to review the final edited "digital twin" with the assistance of some automated check tools. For help with both editing and Q/A, click here. For a useful editing cheat sheet, click here.
4. Further analytics can then be run to generate outputs such as
   1. Vegetation encroachments - there are a variety of encroachment analyses available to run
   2. Tree extraction
   3. Ground clearances and profiles
   4. Sag and other physical network measurements/calculations
   5. Reclassification of the point cloud from the extracted vector model
5. Once this final stage analytics have completed, you will be sent an email notifying you.
6. From here the updated poles and wires analytics can be viewed. Along with the classifications and encroachments, the analytics will also have other information and reports that can be downloaded and used whenever needed.