A city comprises of highly complex underground network, used to deliver public service infrastructural facilities. These may include the pipes that carry water, transport sewage, provide natural gas, electricity and many other such amenities. Often, telecommunications lines and other wires, cables too, may be housed underground.
The civic bodies that manage a city's underground amenities are very detached and work almost in isolation where each has a different map or even a mapping system for the location of their underground conduits. This is a rather troublesome and dangerous fact as the multitude of inaccurate, out-of-sync maps make centralized administration impossible. Infrastructure projects that require some excavation always hit a roadblock as several city council managements need to be individually consulted to check the feasibility of their plans, as a result leading to several delays that ruin efficient urban planning and escalate costs.
A highly accurate overlay map with different resources on different layers makes the underground utility system transparent and easy to navigate, putting all city council managements at the same level. Such an underground utility geospatial system simplifies urban planning and allows all underground conduits, pipes and amenities to be reviewed by all city council members. Civic bodies can view and manage their assets eg. gas pipes, electric cables, trenches, etc. along with detailed and recently updated history i.e. installation, maintenance, repair, etc. for each asset. Thus, by improving data efficacy, an underground utility MIS makes urban planning more efficient, reduces city council turn-around times, saving and reducing project costs.