Designing road maintenance data model using dynamic segmentation technique

Abstract

Road maintenance management covers a wide spectrum of activities including road construction, rehabilitation and maintenance programs, etc. Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) can immensely assist the decision makers in these applications. Arc-node data models represent roads as linear features with associated attributes. The attributes are linked to arcs with similar length and location without attention to the applications at hand. In addition, these models do not provide the efficient way to present more detailed information of roads. Because Arc-node structure defines the linear feature as an arc and it is not possible to present road data varying in different parts of arc. Therefore, road maintenance data models which are only on the basis of Arc-node structure result in inefficient analysis and even the results which are not consistent with reality. In order to improve the flexibility of such Arc-node presentation in GIS-T, this paper scientifically examines Dynamic Segmentation (DS), that it is an efficient means to manage the heterogeneous attributes along the arcs. Moreover, this research proposed the road maintenance data model using DS technique. The data model in this work was successfully implemented in the Iranian road network. The result on real data illustrated the merits of the present approach. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.