Locate Request Screening

Locate request screening is the check a utility makes on every one-call (811) excavation ticket before it answers: is anything of ours inside the dig, and how dangerous is the work? Locate Request Screening does that check with five agents. They send the no-conflict replies, rank the rest by risk, and draft a standby crew and pre-dig meeting for every machine dig within 3 m of a 33 kV+ cable or 300 mm+ trunk main. The damage prevention coordinator decides.

The ticket reader reads the dig method, depth, extent and start from the ticket and draws the dig area. The asset overlay lists every cable and main inside the area and a 3 m buffer, with its recorded depth and how sure that depth is. The risk scorer weighs method and depth against each asset's depth less a 0.5 m safe margin, plus asset class, crossings, excavator history and depth certainty, and applies the standby floors.

It clears only when nothing of the utility's is within the clear distance — 15 m in the sample rules — and the area is not held. Each clear records why it was clear, and 5% are sampled every day for a person to mark Agree or Should have been located. Any area with as-built drawings still to post is held and sent to a locator, never cleared.

A score of 80 or more is a standby; 50 to 79 is elevated, a locate and a site meeting. On top of the score, standby floors are hard rules: a mechanical method within 3 m of a 33 kV+ cable or a 300 mm+ trunk main always gets a standby, a pre-dig meeting and trial holes by hand. In the sample, a tracked excavator to 1.8 m over a 132 kV cable at 1.1 m scores 94.

Yes. It reads electricity and water records together — 132 kV to low-voltage cables, fibre, trunk mains, distribution mains and service pipes — with each asset's depth source and uncertainty. A trunk main recorded from a 1978 drawing at 1.4 m ±0.4 adds points for the uncertain depth, and works near the big mains go to the water network engineer.

Yes. The agents draft; the coordinator confirms every standby and elevated ticket before a reply goes back, and works within 3 m of a 33 kV or 132 kV cable need the cable engineer's approval. The agents cannot clear inside a buffer, lower a standby floor or confirm a standby, and weight changes learned from strikes are only proposed.

Yes. The buffer, clear distance, safe margin, standby and elevated thresholds, asset and method weights, standby floors, clear audit sample, response clock, response codes and approvers are all settings. Changes are saved as a new version and approved.

The Agentic Solution Engine builds and deploys it from your requirements and documents — your one-call response rules, safe-digging procedures, asset records and a sample of past tickets and strikes — and it goes live once every quality gate has passed. We will walk you through it on your own tickets first.