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Track: Transportation, Logistics Planning
Zhanmin Zhang
The University of Texas
ECJ 6.10
Austin, TX 78712
Telephone: 512-471-7741
Fax: 512-475-8744
E-mail: zhanmin@mail.utexas.edu
W. Ronald Hudson
Visual IMS-A GIS Integrated Infrastructure Management System
Transportation and public works agencies are currently challenged by increasing demands for better services and constrained budgets to maintain municipal infrastructures in good condition. Better information and management systems are therefore in urgent need to support more effective and efficient decision making. An infrastructure management system (IMS) is such a system capable of properly coordinating, systematically evaluating, and effectively maintaining basic service-related infrastructure systems. The objective of this research is to develop a new IMS framework, a GIS integrated IMS, Visual IMS. Visual IMS is developed primarily for application in public works agencies. Currently three subsystems are included: road, water supply, and wastewater. The main purpose of Visual IMS is to provide a series of rational, well-ordered analyses of input data so that all infrastructures involved can be effectively maintained above the specified minimum level of performance at a minimum overall cost. Visual
IMS is developed under ArcView GIS. The language employed to program Visual IMS is Avenue, an object-oriented GIS programming language capable of handling the operations of both numerical data and graphical objects. Visual IMS runs under the Windows environment and is facilitated with user-friendly graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It can be either operated as a self-sufficient IMS or used to enhance the user friendliness and visual capability of an existing IMS. The key difference between the Visual IMS and other decision support systems is that Visual IMS is able to handle a wide variety of data and information visually, analyze them spatially, and present the results graphically, taking advantage of both GIS and multimedia technologies.
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