Introducing Infrastructure: Roads, Watermains, and Sewers in AssetLab

For years, AssetLab has helped organizations manage the assets that live inside their buildings - HVAC units, generators, elevators, fire panels. But for municipalities and campus operators, the most valuable assets don't sit in a mechanical room. They run under the streets and along the rights-of-way: watermains, sanitary and storm sewers, roads, streetlights, fibre, gas lines.

The new Infrastructure module brings those linear and spatial assets into AssetLab as first-class citizens - on a map, in your work orders, in your preventive maintenance program, and in your capital plan. It is available on the City plan, enabled per organization by an administrator.

What It Is

Infrastructure organizes your buried and linear assets into networks - a sanitary collection system, a road network, a water distribution system. Each network contains features of two kinds:

• Segments - linear assets such as pipe runs, road sections, and cable spans, with length, material, install date, slope, and inverts.
• Nodes - point assets such as manholes, valves, hydrants, catch basins, and poles.

Segments know which nodes they connect to, so your data carries real topology: a sewer main knows its upstream and downstream manholes, and the system can tell you when a segment's endpoints don't line up with anything - a data-quality signal most GIS exports quietly hide.

Every feature carries a condition score (0-100) with a full inspection history, and every network rolls those scores up into a Network Condition Index (NCI) - length-weighted, so a failing 800-metre trunk main moves the needle more than a failing service stub. NCI is captured to history automatically whenever conditions change, giving you a trend line per network without any manual snapshotting.

The Map Is the Front Door

Open the Infrastructure page and you get a fast, modern map built on vector tiles - smooth at city scale, whether you have 500 features or 50,000. Color the map by condition, filter by network, material, asset class, or feature type, and click any segment or node to slide open its full detail: attributes, inspection history with a condition trend chart, linked work orders, photos, and documents.

Prefer rows and columns? Switch to the table view, or use split view where the map and table stay in sync - click a row, the map highlights the feature; click the map, the table scrolls to the row. Every table header sorts.

You can also bring your own basemaps. Many municipalities have licensed aerial imagery or provincial WMS layers behind authentication; AssetLab supports custom XYZ, WMS, and WMTS sources, including authenticated ones. Credentials are stored encrypted server-side and tiles are fetched through a secure proxy, so your imagery keys never reach the browser.

Getting Your Data In: The Import Wizard

The fastest path from "we have a GIS export" to "our city is on the map" is the import wizard. It accepts the three formats that cover nearly every real-world delivery: GeoJSON (the modern default), Shapefile (upload the .zip straight from ArcGIS or QGIS), and CSV with WKT geometry (the spreadsheet escape hatch, common for consultant deliverables).

Drag the file in and the wizard walks you through the rest:

Behind the scenes the importer does the unglamorous work GIS data demands: it repairs self-intersecting geometry where it safely can, explodes multi-part features, harvests elevations from 3D geometry into invert fields, and even captures station/chainage values from M-aware geometries so nothing in your source file is silently thrown away.

ESRI Integration

Most cities already run ArcGIS, and we designed Infrastructure to work with it rather than demand a migration.

Operate It Like Everything Else in AssetLab

Once features exist, they plug into the workflows your team already uses:

• Work orders - create one directly from a feature on the map; it opens pre-filled. Completed work flows into per-feature cost history.
• Preventive maintenance - schedule PMs against an individual feature or an entire network ("flush every hydrant in Zone 3 annually"), with automatic work-order generation and catch-up handling.
• Inspections - record visual, CCTV, PCI survey, core sample, or gauge readings with photos, and watch the condition trend chart update.
• Compliance - scope recurring compliance items to a network, not just a building.
• Capital planning - replacement plans work per-feature and per-network, so a whole watermain renewal campaign sits in your planner next to your roof replacements; condition-driven forecasts paint the map by projected replacement year.
• Documents, photos, comments, custom fields, parts - everything you can attach to a building asset, you can attach to a sewer segment.

Automation: REST API and MCP

The full module is exposed through AssetLab's external REST API and MCP server. Tenant-scoped API keys with granular read/write scopes let your scripts list networks, create features, log inspections, and file work orders.

Built Multi-Tenant From Day One

Infrastructure inherits AssetLab's security model wholesale. Every feature, inspection, import job, and Esri source is isolated to your organization by row-level security enforced in the database - not just in the application. Imports run through a private, tenant-scoped storage bucket. Esri tokens and basemap credentials are encrypted at rest. And tenant identity always derives from your verified session, never from anything a client sends.

Getting Started

Infrastructure is available today on the City plan. An administrator turns it on in Settings, and the typical first hour looks like this: create a network, drag in last year's GIS export, confirm the preview, and watch your city appear on the map. If your data lives in ArcGIS, paste your FeatureServer URL and you'll see it even sooner.

Your streets, pipes, and poles have been managing themselves long enough. Put them on the map.