GIS stands for Geographical Information System. This science is learned by Geodetic Engineering student. GIS mostly applicable for Mechanical Engineer in Pipeline Inspection or Pipeline data management. There fore, if your role is Pipeline Engineer or other Job role related to Pipeline, than you need to understand how to use GIS to support your daily jobs. now we wil talk about GIS for Mechanical engineer.
In field, Oil and Gas company may have thousand pipeline segments and thousands pipeline kilometer length. Pipeline location is monitoring by GIS database and poeple use GPS to find the pipeline location at field.
The most popular software used in GIS is ArcGIS from ESRI. If you are interested to use it, you can get Software and trial license for 3 months from ESRI. I recommend you to try it so you can see some feature that can be useful for Mechanical Engineer or Facility Engineer-Pipeline.
The idea of using GIS software is to visualize pipeline data or pipeline condition related to its location. For example, if your pipeline has a segment ( 1 meter length) that corroded and wall loss reached untill 80%, what will you do? By using GIS, you can easily to find this segment. Is the segment location near public area or near river? Do we need immediate actions?
In the next article, i will explain more about GIS advantages and its features.