ArcGIS Indoors is a complete system for indoor mapping and tracking that provides organizations with smart building management. It lets you create, customize, share, and apply smart building maps and location data. It uses ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Enterprise, and ArcGIS Indoors licensing to provide users with everything required to take your organization’s building data, implement maps and services, and share them with the organization or the public.
Indoor mapping is a revolutionary concept that visualizes an indoor venue using spatial data on a digital 2D or 3D map. It shows places, people, and assets on an indoor digital map, enabling powerful capabilities such as indoor positioning, navigation, and real-time common operations view. Indoor Mapping creates an indoor digital twin of your campus, giving your organization the ability to collaborate with digital indoor maps, plan building operations, and build routable networks using Indoor Positioning for Smart Buildings.
The Missoula County Courthouse, located in the heart of Downtown Missoula, Montana, was selected as a demonstration of GeoBusiness’ Indoor Mapping capabilities. Working alongside the Courthouse’s GIS Manager, GCS created an ArcGIS Indoor 3D test model of the facility based on County provided non-confidential CAD files.
Creating an Indoor Mapping Dataset
A Floor Plan defines the boundaries of a campus, facilities (buildings and other structures), levels (floors), units (occupiable spaces), and details (walls, doors, and other features), and forms the basis for visualization in floor-aware maps.
Before adding floor plan data, one must create a dataset containing a hierarchy of feature classes necessary for maintaining floor plan data (including Sites, Facilities, Levels, Units, and Details) that conforms to the ArcGIS Indoors Information model.
ArcGIS Indoors Information Model
The ArcGIS Indoors Information Model supports the management of indoor GIS information necessary to share properly configured web maps and mobile map packages for use with Indoor Viewer, Indoor Space Planner, Indoor Floor Plan Editor, Indoors Mobile, and other apps that use floor-aware maps and scenes.
The Indoors model consists of three feature datasets (Indoor GIS Layers, Network Layers, and Indoor 3D Layers) with a collection of feature classes between them which maintain configuration information.
The Indoors GIS Layers dataset consists of feature classes that are organized into a hierarchy with assumed spatial relationships.
- Units – Describes the footprints of nonoverlapping individual functional areas such as workspaces, amenities, retail spaces, elevators and stairways, and so on. Contained in the Levels feature.
- Detail – Describes linear assets, such as walls, doors, windows, and so on. Details are used to constrain generated network pathways and to support visualization. Contained in the Levels features.
- Events – Describes event locations and is used to support the search and explore capabilities, identification, routing, and identification of landmarks in routing. Events are manually loaded from other data sources. Contains both indoor and outdoor information.
- Occupants – Contains data about building occupants. This data is used to visualize person assignments on the map and is used for space planning and workspace reservations in the Indoors web and mobile apps.
- Reservations – A floor-aware and time-aware layer that contains reservation features. This editable layer is used to manage workspace reservations and visualize reservations on a map.
- Sections – Describes the footprints of nonoverlapping areas of organization in a level, such as wings, and is used for visualization in mapmaking. Contained in the Levels feature.
- Zones – Describes the footprints of possibly overlapping areas of organization in a level, such as security, functional, managerial, retail zones, and so on, and is used for visualization in mapmaking. Contained in the Levels features.
- TrackingZones – Tracking geofences for device tracking, areas where device tracking should be enabled. Devices located in a tracking zone will be tracked if configured in your environment.
- Levels – Describes the footprint of each level contained in managed facilities. Contained in the Facilities feature.
- Facilities – Describes the footprints of managed facilities.
- Sites – Describes the boundaries of managed sites and is used for visualization in mapmaking.
Network Feature Classes
- Landmarks – Describes easily recognizable points that are used as callouts in directions when routing between locations in the Indoor web and mobile apps.
- Pathways – Describes the network pathways generated by the Indoors geoprocessing tools in ArcGIS Pro for routing between locations on the same level.
- Transitions – Describes the network transitions generated by the Indoors geoprocessing tools in ArcGIS Pro for routing between levels.
Indoor 3D Feature Classes
- Details – Describes any type of detailed architectural features, such as walls, doors, windows, and so on. This feature class is used to support visualization.
- Doors – Describes the different types of doors.
Indoors Information Model Implementation Workflow
The following workflow provides a high-level explanation of the steps required for implementation.
- Build indoor mapping data
Combine source CAD and BIM data (sometimes PDFs) into an indoor geospatial system of record.
For GeoBusiness, connect ERP, asset, and business systems. - Create digital floor-aware maps and apps
Define and implement workflows/capabilities for security and asset management.
With the single source of indoor data, create intuitive and easily understood floor-aware maps that highlight people, places, and assets. - Deploy indoor maps into everyone’s hands
Workflow training, i.e., security, asset work order, etc.
Give access. - Inform operations and decision-making; Go live
The Indoor Mapping solution provides complete situational awareness, giving operations staff and decision-makers crucial location intelligence.
Once the ArcGIS IPS Information Model has been created, prepare and share a web map for use in the IPS Setup app. The app allows the user to plan and perform surveys to collect environmental data required to enable indoor positioning. The survey data is stored as recording features that can be uploaded from IPS Setup to the web map shared to an ArcGIS organization. The survey data can then be used to generate an indoor positioning file.
Implementation of Indoor Positioning System (IPS)
Analyzing indoor location data through geospatial analytics offers in-depth insights into various aspects, including service time optimization, dwell time, proximity analysis, asset location allocation, occupancy, and other elements related to space utilization. This wealth of information enables informed decision-making in building management, ultimately enhancing operational efficiency and overall user experience within facilities.
To create a real-time ‘blue dot experience’, and Indoor Positioning System (IPS) leverages Bluetooth signals obtained from BLE beacons or Wi-Fi signals within buildings. These Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, compact Internet of Things (IoT) devices, transmit signals at specified intervals and power levels, carrying information about their identity. A strategic beacon placement plan is developed to determine the optimal locations for these transmitters, ensuring the best possible positioning accuracy. Notably, a minimum of four (4) beacons are necessary to establish a functioning IPS.
These beacons provide a high level of accuracy with a signal range of up to 30 meters while having a relatively low cost of ownership.
Collection of Asset Locations
Insights derived from geographical data plan a crucial role in the enhancement of organizational decision-making. The process of collecting indoor data is a scalable approach that boosts the availability of information for responsive actions within your organization. Concurrently, indoor analytics represents a forward-looking strategy, involving the synthesis of data to formulate high-value strategic and tactical plans.
Indoor data encompasses a range of valuable information, including asset status, locations, characteristics, interior building details, floor plans, maintenance history, occupancy metrics, and insights from positioning systems. This diverse dataset can be directly utilized to guide fieldworkers towards more efficient problem resolution or subjected to analysis for informed decision-making in facilities management and space utilization.
The significance of structured location data pertaining to assets within your facilities cannot be overstated when striving for a comprehensive understanding of the built environment. This understanding empowers personnel to execute their tasks more efficiently while actively contributing to the data collection and management process. For building occupants, this data proves invaluable for identifying the locations of essential items such as first aid kits, defibrillators, printers, kiosks, and more. Comprehensive data management involves tracking asset locations, maintenance history, facility conditions, usage patterns other elements for thorough analysis and informed decision-making.
Summary
Indoor analytics and data sharing with location as a core organizing principle across teams helps individuals to make better decisions and respond quickly to issues. Key capabilities of GeoBusiness Indoor Solutions & Services include:
- Build an indoor system of record
- Put indoor maps into the hands of your organization’s personnel
- Inform operations and decision-making
- Build routable networks
GeoBusiness is based on Esri’s pioneering ArcGIS technology. Esri, the global market leader in geographic information systems (GIS), offers the most powerful mapping and spatial analytics technology available.
GeoBusiness integrates with relevant asset data sources allowing data exchange with enterprise business systems and ERPs such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Oracle NetSuite. Workflow automation and alerts provide the ability to plan maintenance and work orders.
With GeoBusiness, organizations gain seamless outdoor and indoor mapping and visualization with health and status dashboards and mobile indoor mapping apps. Users can monitor the movement of assets with real-time location tracking. With asset monitoring and condition tracking, capture asset-specific information such as environmental conditions.
You must be logged in to post a comment.