Zones, routes & corridors

Three overlays that make big networks manageable - hydraulic and district zones, attribute-built routes, and auto-computed dig-once corridors.

Networks and classes say what things are; these three overlays say how you operate them. All are optional - adopt the ones that match how your organization actually plans.

Where routes and corridors live

Features, routes and corridors are three levels of the same thing, so they share one screen. On Infrastructure the tier switcher sits beside the table/split/map buttons in the toolbar: Features, Routes, Corridors. Switching tier keeps you on the page and swaps what the table lists, which columns it shows, and what the map draws. The search box, the view modes and the density and column controls carry across.

Filters follow the tier, because not every filter means something at every level. Features get all seven. Routes get feature class and network - a route belongs to one network. Corridors get none: a corridor spans networks and has no material, condition or risk of its own, so the filter panel is hidden there and search alone narrows the list.

In every tier, clicking a row opens a detail panel from the right edge - the same panel a feature gives you, carrying that route's or corridor's stats and members, with Open full page at the bottom. In split view features and corridors select instead, and the map beside the table answers the click, since a panel there would cover what you just pointed at. Routes are the exception: they open the panel in split view too, because the map can only answer a route with "these segments, this extent" - its length, its network and its ordered member list with chainage live nowhere else. Double-clicking always goes straight to the full page.

Zones - areas within a network

A zone is a bounded area within one network, of a fixed kind: pressure zone, DMA (district metered area), sewershed, storm catchment, or maintenance district. Each zone belongs to exactly one network - a pressure zone belongs to Water, a sewershed to Sanitary. A zone cannot span networks, so it's a hydraulic or operational unit, not a general-purpose ward boundary.

Features fall inside their network's zones, which turns zones into reporting and dispatch units:

• Condition and replacement value by pressure zone or catchment
• Work volume by maintenance district
• Filtering the list or map to one area - a zone filter clips the map tiles to its boundary

Routes - built from your data

A route is an ordered chain of segments within a network: the plow route, the sweeping circuit, the flushing loop. You don't hand-order them - Build routes from attribute takes a network and one of the keys your features' external IDs already carry (a route number from GIS, say) and hydrates the routes in bulk. Each member segment carries linear-referencing measures - where along the route it starts and ends, and its orientation - so route positions survive resegmentation.

Routes support:

• Programmed maintenance drives (PM schedules against a route's work)
• Route-level condition summaries ("Priority Route 1 average PCI")
• Level of service measures like "% of priority routes cleared within 8 hours"

The Routes tier's map draws the filtered network the same way the Features tier does, but a click selects the route rather than the segment: the route's members light up and the map fits to them, so "which parts of Main Street are bad" is one click. Selecting from the table does the same thing. Picking a route on the map only needs a filter set, like any other map view.

Corridors - the coordination layer

A corridor bundles features across networks that share a physical alignment: Elm Street's pavement, the watermain under it, the sanitary main beside it.

You don't build corridors - AssetLab computes them by normalizing street names across networks, and recomputes them on a schedule (there's also a Recompute button for after a big sync). Each corridor carries bundles: renewal windows where multiple networks' replacement years align, with an urgency band and an estimated coordination saving - what you avoid in restoration cost by opening the trench once.

The urgency band comes from how far the bundle's window start is from today, and reserves red for work you are already carrying:

High member risk widens the Urgent horizon: a bundle whose riskiest feature scores 16 or more out of 25 counts as Urgent up to 4 years out rather than 2. Risk never widens Past due - a window that has passed has passed. The corridor list sorts by this band, so past-due corridors come first.

In the Corridors tier the map draws every active corridor as a line coloured by its urgency band, with no filtering needed. Click a corridor on the map or in the table and the other follows.

Administrators tune the computation: match tolerance (metres), timing tolerance (years), restoration cost per metre, and the minimum number of networks that makes a bundle worth flagging. Both controls - Settings and Recompute - sit in the page header while the Corridors tier is showing.

Corridors exist to prevent the classic municipal embarrassment - repaving a road two years before digging it up for the main underneath. When a bundle's window approaches, the replacement planner conversation becomes "do the whole corridor in 2028" instead of three uncoordinated projects.

Turning a selection into a project

In the Routes and Corridors tiers, press Select above the table to put a checkbox on each row - the same button the Features tier uses. What you check gathers into a basket above the table. The basket spans tiers, so you can gather two corridors and the route running between them and still create one project from all of it. Pressing Done puts the checkboxes away without emptying the basket, so you can leave selection mode, read a corridor on the map, and come back to what you had gathered. Managers and above; the basket clears when you clear it or when a project is created from it.

Create project opens a dialog with a renewal-year window, and the window is the point. A corridor's features do not all wear out together - some renew in 2028 and others in the 2060s - so the project covers only the members that renew inside the window you choose. It is pre-filled with the earliest renewal year in your selection plus your corridor timing tolerance, which is the same span the dig-once bundler clusters over, and you can widen or move it.

Before you create anything the dialog tells you what the window means:

• how many features renew inside it, and across how many networks
• how many of those are already on an active project, which are left out rather than double-booked
• how many fall outside the window and stay available for a later project
• how many have no renewal year at all (no in-service date, or no service life on the feature, its material, or its feature class) and so cannot be scheduled
• the replacement value of what is left, which pre-fills the budget and stays editable

That last point about features already on a project is the reason to keep windows tight. A feature committed to a live project is skipped by every later renewal project, which is what stops the same pipe being budgeted twice. Commit a whole corridor to one project and you also take its 2060s features off the table for the next thirty years of planning, so the dialog warns you when a window runs longer than ten years.

Projects created this way arrive in planning status, typed as capital, with every included feature linked on the project's Infrastructure tab. They start on 1 January of the window's first year - or today, when that year has already passed, since a project you create now should not open in a closed budget year. The need year is written into the project description when that happens, so nothing is lost. From there they behave like any other project.

Corridor renewal bundles keep their own path: the Create project button on a corridor's page creates a project from one bundle, already scoped to that bundle's window. Use the bundle when you are acting on what the analysis found, and a selection when you are acting on what you picked.

Choosing your overlays