International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII, Part 5. Hakodate 1998 
DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSMISSION ROUTE ADVANCED DESIGN SYSTEM (TRADES) 
BY USING VISUALIZING SOFTWARE 
Shinya ITO, Kenji TERADA, Junichi IMASAKI 
Research Associate, Hokkaido Electric Power Co., R&D Dpt. 
2-1, Tsuishikari, Ebetsu, Hokkaido 
E-mail: itos@epmail.hepco.co.jp 
JAPAN 
Commission V, Working Group SIG 
KEY WORDS: TRADES, transmission route design, power cable route, optimized route definition 
ABSTRACT 
This paper presents the Transmission Route Advanced DEsign System (TRADES) developed for designing 
optimized route of power transmission lines on a digital map by using terrain visualizing software. The system has 
been constructed on a super graphic work station. The time consumption and costs are drastically improved 
comparing with the conventional manual works. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The development of computer graphic  (CG) 
technologies of recent years presents us so called the 
virtual reality that visualizes numerical images as like as 
a real worlds on computer screen. The three 
dimensional (3D) CG is particularly powerful for 
visualization of complicated scientific phenomena and 
for visual entertainments. Not only that, the computer 
technology has  potentiality also in industrial 
applications. 
In this paper, a computer aided designing system named 
Transmission Route Advanced  DEsign System 
(TRADES) developed for designing optimized route of 
power transmission lines on a digital map by using 
terrain visualizing software is presented. The system 
has been constructed on a super graphic work station 
and is capable to display landform with series of electric 
tower in 3D format as a result of numerical optimizing 
processing made behind. 
It may be easily understood how effective the computer 
3D presentation by TRADES is, remembering the 
conventional ways, in which the 3D image of the 
landscape was constructed in mind of the operators and 
the work thus requires special skill and is very time 
consuming. 
TRADES is, in present, under final exam at Electrical 
878 
Engineering Department of Hokkaido Electric Power Co.. 
2. BASIC DESIGNING PROCEDURE 
The basic designing procedure of the transmission line 
route takes account of the tower height, that must be 
selected as to keep the wire separation from ground not 
less than the lowest standard anywhere along the line, 
and the tower locations giving minimized cost in total. 
Note that the tower height therefore depends on the 
landform and it strongly affects the construction costs. 
In decision of the final practical route, some more 
additional parameters must be also considered and 
therefore the design procedure becomes extremely 
complicated. TRADES may be invaluable in the design 
work providing user friendly visual digital tools. 
3. MAIN FEATURES OF TRADES 
TRADES has been developed approaching to a user 
friendly and powerful computer aided engineering (CAE) 
tool and constructed on a super graphic workstation 
with the following features. 
(1)Data format 
‘The digital terrain model (DTM) standard format, as 
used in digital maps, is directly readable. 
The DTM data are transformed into our original triangle 
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