Upgrading National Pavement Management System
Overview
ASFiNAG (Autobahn- und Schnellstraßen- Finanzierungs-AG) has been responsible for planning, engineering, right-of-ways acquisition, construction, reconstruction, maintenance, traffic, regulation and maintenance on Austria’s 2,200 km of motorways and expressways.
Additional duties include highway research, outdoor advertising contiguous to state roads, safety enforcement and noise control and dissemination of highway information (Traffic App, Service Center). The pavement management division has the total network in dTIMS.
Typically there are two types of users of a pavement management system. One type is a user of the pavement management software and the other is a user of the pavement management information. The first user is concerned primarily with the management and update of the asset database and the analysis system. The second user is more interested in working with the outcome of the analysis.
The Austrian motorway company (ASFiNAG) originally acquired Deighton’s dROAD (a desktop-based, stand-alone data storage and network management tool) and dTIMS (a Pavement Analysis Package) in 1998.
The Challenge
The new system was a significant leap forward in the sophistication and effectiveness of the department's management of their pavement assets; however, available technology didn't permit easy sharing of the data with the districts who would ultimately need to make project-level decisions. A solution was needed to get this information into the hands of local pavement management engineers.
Solution
In 2011, ASFiNAG requested that Viagroup, Deighton's European distributor, upgrade their current pavement management system. The project involved moving from a desktop-based version of dTIMS to a server-based (SQL) version of dTIMS. In addition, Viagroup would implement dTIMS Workflow (wf). The goal was to leverage contemporary technology in order to provide easy access to pavement management information in the district offices while leaving the task of managing the PMS data and execution of the network analysis at central office.
Outcome
dTIMS SQL and dTIMS wf are working together to provide strategic and network level analysis capabilities in central office while the local engineers use dTIMS wf to support their project level decisions.
Moving to an enterprise version of dTIMS and launching dTIMS wf will help improve ASFiNAG decision-making capabilities by providing timely information in a logical, organized and justifiable manner at all levels of the pavement engineering team. This includes running network level analysis to determine which areas of the state require the most funding and then providing the individual regions with recommendations for project level programs. The Region would then interact with the central office software utilizing a browser-based application that simplifies the interaction and promote sustainability at the local level.
