Throughout the developed world there is substantial pressure to reduce the amount of new road infrastructure being built and to pay more attention to the better management of the existing road network and associated information. As a result, responsible agents at local, county, state and national levels are looking to adopt sophisticated IT systems. These systems are based around a central data store of the highways and associated inventory which naturally have a strong geographical component. This paper examines how GIS can be used as the data integrator and user interface and thus become an essential part of such systems and discusses the design issues associated with such an approach. At a practical level the paper goes on to highlight why Esri GIS is so well suited for highways systems and describes a real-life application where ArcInfo and ArcView have been integrated with Oracle RDBMS to provide a total solution for Highways
The Georgia Department of Transportation's Planning Data Services Bureau contracted with the University of Georgia's Government Information Services Division to develop statewide basemap layers to support GIS applications in the area of pavement management. One of the major requirements of this initiative was to establish a relationship between the basemap's route features and the DOT's Road Characteristics Database (RCFILE). The RCFILE contains attribute information (linear, continuous, and point events) for state, county, and city level routes and is based on a county-route-milepoint linear referencing system. The resulting basemap contains thousands of ArcInfo route features for each county which have been calibrated and quality checked using attribute information pulled from the RCFILE. This paper discusses specific database design issues related to the Georgia DOT's Pavement Management System. Topics discussed include (1) the Route-System Data Model, (2) using dynamic segmentation, (3) working with route features, (4) the RCFILE, and (5) supported pavement management applications.
This paper describes the implementation of a Long Range Decision-Support System for the Indian Railways (IR) which has been under development during the last two years. The system incorporates GIS (ArcView) as a user interface, as means of storing and retrieving system inventory and facility management data, as a link to transportation models, and as an interface to a set of evaluation tools for investment and marketing decisions. This set of functions provides an user-oriented system that has greatly improved information available to IR managers over the previous system, which depended on manual, hard copy reports. The system added flexibility and analytic power as well as spatial data that was not previously available in a timely fashion to managers. The system has already identified major costs savings in achieving rail line capacity expansion and is contributing to the process of changing IR priorities to achieve more cost-effective investments and marketing strategies. The paper will describe data base and modeling issues as well as GIS and analysis issues.