GIS, A tool for pavement management

A pavement management system (PMS) should tackle all aspects of the pavement management process from planning and programming through project development and implementation (Shahin 2005). Geographic information systems (GIS) can be used to expand and enhance each of these PMS components. A GIS can be designed as a platform on which the PMS is built and operated. Such a system is designated a PMS/GIS. Few years back, the Directorate of Municipal Affairs (DMA) - Abu Dhabi Municipality -Roads Section took their first serious steps towards developing a Pavement Management System (PMS). A number of projects were initiated, covering Abu Dhabi Island and the Mainland, to assist in migrating from the existing Management Information System (MIS) to the anticipated newly developed PMS. A major component in most of the projects as well as this project “Maintenance, Rehabilitation and Additional Works for Roads and Bridges in Abu Dhabi Island” is to evaluate the condition of existing roads’ pavement by carrying out certain tests, which will indicate and suggest the further course of action for determining the strategies for the improvement of the roads pavement quality. In this project two types of tests were carried out, the Roughness Testing for the determination of the International Roughness Index (IRI) and the Non-destructive deflection testing particularly Falling Weight Deflection method (FWD) in order to determine the riding quality and to assess the structural integrity of the existing roads pavement respectively. The principal objective of this thesis is to reveal the role of the GIS technology in the enhancement of PMS components such as the output results from the two performed tests, and make it more interpretable through dynamic color coding and more sophisticated visualization techniques than the conventional tabular data format. Another objective was to show the importance of using GIS as a platform for PMSs, though it is still a few steps ahead to achieve this goal and requires team work involving other specializations, but ultimately it would be done within the course of the running projects. The output result from the roughness survey was GPS test locations, the processed IRI values for left and right wheel paths and the video streaming data. IRI values were used as an attribute data for the constructed, segmented lane lines in ArcGIS 9.2. Triggered roughness values were identified to classify IRI values into five classes reflecting the status of the pavement surface. The lane lines were symbolized and color-coded using these five classes. A standalone application known as “ROMDAS Data view” was developed based on a database comprising road location references (Change points), video data and the IRI values. An ArcGIS Extension, known as VideoDRS, was also used to enabling Indexing and playback of the video in reference to the GPS locations. Attribute data integration between IRI & FWD data was performed for each test location every 100m along the survey route. As a result, roughness data can be viewed through many techniques, VideoDRS and the ROMDAS Data view. GIS-based maps were produced for the whole Main Roads network for Abu Dhabi Island in reference to the condition data surveyed i.e. IRI Network & FWD Overlay Network