Pipe Planner | Devpost

Showcase of pipe network
Live reports

Inspiration

We wanted to make a service that would be useful for the client - Northumbrian Water Group - in their daily activities as they expressed how their current tech stack was primitive compared to modern standards. Our current solution aims to streamline the process of pipe planning in particular as we felt that this would be an apt application of technology to assist in a frequent task - the designing of pipe networks.

What it does

Our service aims to help the client to plan pipelines across the northeast via an interactive map with various features that are togglable in a sidebar. Further to this, a separate client page is included that allows users on any web-enabled device to report faults in their local area via a similar interactive map. These reports are sent back to the central server, through to the client's page, and displayed as a heatmap overlayed on top. This heatmap layer can also be turned off to instead show the individual reports as markers instead, which provide more detailed descriptions of the issues that users are facing in the network.

How we built it

We built the product using the google maps API for javascript to import their map and overlay various features on top of it. Javascript and CSS were also used liberally to handle the logic of the program and the various post and get requests between the websites and the server - which was constructed and hosted via NodeJS. NodeJS was also used to handle the numerous POST and GET requests that are made between the web pages and the server in order to handle the data being sent between the two.

What's next for Pipe Planner

We hope to include more features for the editor in the future to streamline further the process of our client, such as the ability to place markers on the map that emulate water stations, pumps and other buildings of particular interest to them. We also want to implement the ability to save and load the pipe systems that the clients create so that they can share them amongst themselves more easily. Further to this, we intend on adding features to the user report section, such as the ability to provide more generalised descriptions of whether or not an incident was a fault, leakage etc.