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A GIS-Based Process for Calculating Visibility Impact from Buildings During Transmission Line Routing

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Connecting a Digital Europe Through Location and Place

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((LNGC))

Abstract

Planning linear infrastructures can be a tedious task for regions characterized by complex topography, natural constraints, high density population areas, and strong local opposition. These aspects make the planning of new transmission lines complex and time consuming. The method proposed in this work uses Multi-Criteria Analysis and Least-Cost Path approaches combined with a viewshed analysis in order to identify suitable routes. The visual impact is integrated, as a cost surface, into the process and combined with natural and anthropological constraints. The cumulated visibility of each raster cell is estimated as the sum of the weighted distance between buildings and the cell itself. In order to reduce the typical zig-zags resulting from Least-Cost Path methods, a weighted straightening approach is applied. A sensitivity analysis of the weights of the visibility and the straightening is carried out in order to assess different scenarios and to compare the existing TL path to the proposed ones. The method is applied to a case study where an old transmission line needs to be replaced by a new one and the local grid operator needs to identify feasible routes. A set of 30 routes is identified and most of them have a lower visibility that the existing path but, only some of them present a comparable complexity to be realized.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ArcGIS installed on a desktop computer, RAM 8GB, CPU 8 core 3.3GHz

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich, Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation, 8093, Zurich, Switzerland

    Stefano Grassi, Roman Friedli & Martin Raubal

  2. Groupe-e, 1763 , Granges-Paccot, Switzerland

    Michel Grangier

Authors
  1. Stefano Grassi
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  2. Roman Friedli
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  3. Michel Grangier
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  4. Martin Raubal
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefano Grassi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University Jaume I of Castellón, Castellón, Spain

    Joaquín Huerta

  2. European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Italy

    Sven Schade

  3. European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy

    Carlos Granell

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Grassi, S., Friedli, R., Grangier, M., Raubal, M. (2014). A GIS-Based Process for Calculating Visibility Impact from Buildings During Transmission Line Routing. In: Huerta, J., Schade, S., Granell, C. (eds) Connecting a Digital Europe Through Location and Place. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03611-3_22

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