Duke Energy came into possession of a large quantity of station drawings for gas pipelines as part of a company acquisition. The drawings were initially intended to be part of a pipeline management system, but the system was never completed and the drawings were never attributed or linked to a database. Duke needed an efficient method for extracting pertinent information from these drawings and inserting that data into a database.

Great Arc developed an automation application to spatially process the 500 non-intelligent AutoCAD drawings and assemble the data into a relational database. This required the development of scanning-like functionality to automate the reading and interpreting the drawings in an intelligent manner. The application checked for a large number of conditions due to the fact that drawings did not always follow standards (data on wrong layers, drawings improperly scaled, drawings not at a consistent origin, data not always in the same location or of the same entity types, etc.). A manual QC process using Microsoft Access and AutoCAD Map ActiveX were used to correct any inconsistencies that the application did not handle.