IENC Waterway Program

IENC Waterway Program – IENC Maintenance and Production.

As a subcontractor to IIC Technologies, Keel Geospatial assists the Louisville District Inland Waterway Program for several consecutive programs contracting cycles for Mapping Services for their Inland Electronic Navigational maintenance program. We work closely with MVD and LRD district offices of St. Paul, Rock Island, St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans, Mobile, Little Rock, Kansas City, Tulsa, Omaha, Chicago, and Louisville for IENC maintenance.  This maintenance of inland maritime products combines imagery, hydrographic surveys, LiDAR National levee database information, SDSFIE topographic and hydrographic layer data, and USCG/IALA List of Lights and Navigational Aids data.

The project consists of providing mapping services for 61 IENCs (and up to 107 IENCs) with 7,260 linear charting miles of navigational products, with additional services to provide support up to 700 products for the program, while controlling and maintaining IENCs from the remote CWBI cloud that includes producing maritime safety of navigation, hydrographic survey data, and specialized services to USCG and private industry that sends up to 500 million tons of material on the waterway at a 2019 value of 400 billion per year.

This contract also provides programming services and under this contract our team was given a task order to create an automatic hydrographic data product solution using E-Hydro data.  This solution utilized API, Python through an open source GDMS connected to CARIS Bathy Database and CARIS Base Editor to take hydrographic survey information, automatically adjust horizontally and vertically to fit the navigational product, remove noise if necessary into surface, automatically move the surface and generate contours and soundings to produce IENC overlays used by the United States Coast Guard for their cutters responsibility to provide buoy tenders for safe water channel markings.