QGas: Interactive Gas Infrastructure Toolkit
For energy system planners, QGas addresses the bottleneck of creating consistent, multi-carrier gas infrastructure datasets from scattered heterogeneous sources.
QGas is an interactive toolkit that integrates GIS-based geometry editing with topology-preserving graph operations to create and extend georeferenced gas infrastructure datasets, reducing the time and errors associated with manual data integration. An example application shows it can extend a natural gas dataset to include hydrogen and CO2 infrastructure.
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.