QGas: Interactive Gas Infrastructure Toolkit

TL;DR

QGas is an interactive web-based toolkit that simplifies the visualization, creation, and extension of georeferenced gas infrastructure datasets, supporting energy system planning and decarbonization efforts.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, GIS-integrated platform for topology-preserving editing and collaborative extension of complex gas infrastructure data.

Findings

Enables digitization and editing of infrastructure plans with topology preservation.

Supports extending datasets to include hydrogen and CO2 infrastructure.

Facilitates preparation of multi-carrier gas datasets for planning.

Abstract

Gas infrastructure datasets are essential inputs for energy system planning to support strategic decision-making toward decarbonization. However, relevant data are typically scattered across heterogeneous sources, including geospatial datasets, image-based infrastructure plans, and tabular data, making it complex, time-consuming, and error-prone to create topology-consistent network representations with existing tools.This paper presents QGas, an interactive toolkit for visualizing, creating, and collaboratively extending georeferenced gas infrastructure datasets. QGas integrates GIS-based geometry editing with topology-preserving graph operations in a unified web-based environment, enabling users to digitize infrastructure plans, edit network elements, manage attributes, and perform topology-consistent modifications while maintaining a georeferenced representation of the system. The toolkit is implemented using a modular architecture based on Python, JavaScript, and the Leaflet mapping library. An illustrative example demonstrates its application in extending a natural gas dataset to include hydrogen and CO2 infrastructure, highlighting QGas's capability to support the preparation of consistent multi-carrier gas infrastructure datasets for energy system planning.