Robert Piane, P.Eng., is a Professional Civil Engineer with 26 years’ experience in the field of asset management and the application of dTIMS. Robert is currently President of Deighton Associates Ltd.
Summary
Clients with lane-based condition data struggle to generate a practical recommended work program from an optimized analysis. They are either faced with having to conflate their lane data before analysis, or post-processing the analysis recommendations to rectify a disjointed works program as the optimized analysis might recommend.
This blog will demonstrate the use of dTIMS’ Ancillary Treatment object to help maintain the integrity of the lane-based condition data and ensure that all required work is completed, at one time, in a given area.
Introduction
A client recently came to Deighton with an issue they were having with their existing pavement management system (PMS). Their pavement network services a high proportion of Heavy Weight Vehicles (HWV) that are restricted to a lane in which they can travel. So, this HWV lane deteriorates faster than the rest of the lanes, as illustrated in Figure 1. Condition data is collected by lane to monitor the condition of all lanes.
Figure 1: HWV Lane Showing Accelerated Distress
For this particular client, the network is managed by various contractors. Often when work was recommended for the HWV lane the contractor, with nothing more than a schedule of rates and a will to do as much work as possible, would apply the same treatment across all lanes and move on. This was seen as a waste of resources and a loss of the remaining service life in the less damaged lanes.
Tighter project controls have reduced these inefficiencies, but have resulted in work not being done in the non-HWV lanes, as illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Non-HWV Lane Damage Ignored
The proposed solution combined the development of lane-based deterioration models and Ancillary Treatments. The combination of these two dTIMS configurations will continue to allow the collection of lane-based condition data while generating a practical program for all lanes, based on the condition of the HWV lane and ancillary treatments for the non-HWV lanes.
The result will be a recommended maintenance and rehabilitation program that will address the needs of all lanes, with the appropriate treatment recommendation for each lane, at the same time.
Thinking a little outside the box with respect to the existing Ancillary Treatment feature in dTIMS and abstracting a multi-lane highway network into a collection of lanes that behave differently (because of the service that each must provide), resulted in the application of Ancillary Treatments to the client’s problem of generating a practical, recommended pavement management program. This approach relied on neither the manipulation of their lane-based condition data or having to post process lane recommendations to combine the work into practical work orders.
Ancillary Treatments
The Ancillary Treatment object within dTIMS was initially developed so that assets that were thought to be additional to the primary asset being managed could be included in the analysis. It was an early attempt to break down asset silos and think about assets as an interrelated system rather than an independent collection of assets. The principal behind the use of Ancillary Treatments was that the primary asset would trigger the generation of a Treatment Strategy and then the condition of other assets in the vicinity of the primary would be checked to see if they too could be included as part of Treatment Strategy for the Analysis Section.
So, early adoptions of Ancillary Treatments in dTIMS would see the definition of Treatments for pavement assets that had related Ancillary Treatments for Sidewalks, Curbs, and other assets within the pavement corridor. The resulting maintenance and rehabilitation recommendations could now be considered closer to project level than just strategic network level recommendations.
The Proposed Analysis Solution
In this case, the proposal to the client was to treat the HWV lane as the dominant or primary lane in the analysis with the other lanes being considered as ancillary to the HWV lane.
Following this thought, Deighton defined a set of Major Treatments in dTIMS that would be related to the condition of the HWV Lane and a set of Ancillary treatments, related to the Major treatments, for each of the other lanes. To cover off the scenario of the HWV lane having no distress while the other lanes have distress that needed attention, we defined a Major Treatment called, “No HWV Maintenance Required”. This triggered the appropriate treatment for the HWV lane and attached to that the appropriate treatments to the other lanes.
Results of the Proposed Solution
The benefits to the client from this proposed solution are:
- the client gets the benefit of the investment made in the lane-based condition data collection that helps to recognize the remaining service life in each lane
- the dTIMS analysis was configured to utilize the lane-based deterioration models developed by the client
- the resulting recommended maintenance and rehabilitation program is comprised of lane specific treatments according to actual and predicted lane-based conditions and
- all the work required in a 1 km section of highway is scheduled to be done at the same time (client specified Analysis Segment)
All of this is done by understanding the needs of the client and applying the existing features of dTIMS, combined with some “thinking outside the box” to satisfy the client’s requirements.
It’s always easier to ask for new dTIMS features that you think might be a way to satisfy your analysis needs. Sometimes, as highlighted in this case, the features needed to do the job might already exist in dTIMS. Have you had a similar case where you were faced with an asset management need and you took the liberty, offered to you by the flexibility and openness of dTIMS, to bend your mind around the situation to utilize features within dTIMS to deliver on the need?
Comments on this specific application of Ancillary Treatments are welcomed, as are stories of similar applications of dTIMS.