The Outlook and Challenges of 'IT' Applications for Gas Pipelines Maintenance Operations

Tokyo Gas Co., ltd, the largest gas company in Japan, supplies city gas to Tokyo Metropolitan area, covering 3000km2 and 9.6million customers. Increasingmaintenance cost and damages of underground utilities let Tokyo Gas start the research and development of digital mapping in 1977. Tokyo Gas developed GIS basic software “TUMSY” in 1983 after the several years’ research of foreign GIS products, which could not afford to store huge and dense pipeline-drawings. GIS basic software TUMSY consisted of DBMS and business applications. By using TUMSY, 30,000 manual drawings were digitized into the database. Then for about 20 years, TUMSY has been reinforced and improved on the same architecture, and various applications with utilization of database have been developed. The history tells us that GIS is essential to the company activities, and must be always implemented on the highest level of technology and business expertise.