GIS for Civil Engineers

CEE 424

GIS for Civil Engineers

Autumn 2015

Instructor

Dr. Kamal Ahmed

121c More Hall. Phone: 543-7613

E-mail address:

Class web site:

Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30- 1:30

Lectures are T and Th. 11:30 – 12:20 CMU 120

Labs: M or W 3:00 to 4:30 (optional)

Teaching Assistant

David Pogreba

Office Hours M and W. 3:00 to 4:30 More computer lab 01 (The Dungeon)

Textbook

Getting to Know ArcGIS, for ArcGIS 10.2 and 10.3, Fourth Edition, ESRI Press, ISBN:9781589483828

Objective

The ultimate goal of the class is to teach you the basics of GIS concepts and technology that can be tailored to certain civil engineering applications. Such applications include, but not limited to environmental issues, transportation, and construction analysis, management, and decision-making. To demonstrate such applications, several guest speakers are invited to describe projects and examples of applications of GIS in civil engineering. Guest speakers will help in creating project ideas that are relevant to civil engineering and will provide help when projects are being done.

Lectures will mainly be used to demonstrate the basic concepts of GIS, as well as occasional demonstration of ArcGIS. Labs will be self-learning times. In order to facilitate this process, I chose a textbook that is very self-explanatory. Assignments can easily be solved by following the step-by-step description in the textbook. You may do the homework in More Hall lab, in the map library, or on your own computer. A new book comes with a 180-day trial of ArcGIS which can be downloaded from esripress.esri.com/bookresources. Look in the beginning of the book section titled “About the software and data” for further instructions.

Projects and assignments

Assignment due Thursdays at 5:00pm in the given weeks in the table below with the exception of Assignment 8 which will be due Tuesday the day of the second exam. You are allowed to be late by one single assignment that cannot be the last one. You must email the TA ahead of the deadline, otherwise no late work will be accepted. Assignments will be delivered in a digital format via the class Canvas site.The data to do the assignments can be found on the lab computers in C:\CEE424. Make sure to put your name in header of the word document.

Homework File format: Firstname-Lastname-Homeworknumber.doc

Example: David-Pogreba-HW2.doc

The final two or three weeks will be devoted to a final project. I will give a description of the data available ahead of time, but you need to reach a final plan no later than the beginning of the sixth week of the quarter. Projects may be a single effort or group work of no more than five students per group. You will have to collect the data; one important source of data is the map library, please attend the tour of the library to learn about different sources of data.

Grading

Homework 35%, exams 30%, project 25%, attendance of speaker talks 10%

Exam dates are given below, no excuses will be accepted, and no makeup exams will be given.