Manhattan Tunnel Information Management System

The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) retained Hatch Mott MacDonald to develop a Tunnel Information Management System (TIMS) to manage and forecast the progress of tunneling efforts related to the East Side Access project, which included the construction of eight tunnels beneath Manhattan.

HMM developed a secure online platform capable of uploading individual inspector reports for the MTA ESA Construction Management team - specifically the Tunnel Excavation and Blast Excavation—into an Oracle database to store the volumes of information. All this is done within the security of the MTA IT network.

HMM worked closely with ESA to ensure that the database was flexible enough to accommodate the myriad reporting requirements that could arise throughout the project. HMM built the TIMS with two main interfaces—an upload application and a reporting application. The upload application takes uniquely formatted spreadsheets, entered via Inspector PDAs and Net books, and checks for data errors. If there are errors, the inspector is alerted of the problems. If there are no errors, then the report is uploaded. The reporting application provides many pre-built daily, weekly, and monthly reports as well as an interface for building on-demand reports.

Project Highlights: 

• Over 20 inspectors uploading reports 24 hours a day
• Tracking TBM mining
• Tracking ground support of the tunnel
• Tracking hundreds of workers
• Tracking various rental and owned equipment
• Integrated PDAs for inspectors