DESIGN and DEVELOPMENT of A GIS-BASED PLATFORM USING OPEN SOURCE COMPONENTS for MONITORING, MAINTENANCE and MANAGEMENT of ROAD NETWORK: The CASE STUDY of CYPRUS

Abstract

Road transport is an important infrastructure system that has a vital role in economic progress, sustainable development, and urban prosperity of societies. Thus, geospatial fundamentals of transport systems need to be adequately considered by the organizations that manage such infrastructures. Furthermore, the adoption of methodologies for monitoring, control and optimisation of transportation networks, from a geographical perspective is crucial to deploy or utilize resources efficiently and cost-effectively. This paper aims to describe the implementation of a complete Geographical Information (GI) based system as developed for the needs of the Cyprus road transport infrastructure. The paper focuses on the system architecture and the presentation of the desktop and mobile application interfaces and utilities. The GI-based system provides a good example of how different tools and open-source components can be integrated to provide a complete solution for collecting, storing, managing, analysing and disseminating geographical information data related to road network infrastructure. The use of the platform within the organization has resulted in a noticeable increase in productivity and accountability. The errors in data collection, analysis and storage were minimized and thus the quality of available data been significantly improved. This is a step towards the achievement of the goals of the European Digital Strategy by using Geographical Information System technologies to take reliable and accurate decisions related to road network monitoring, maintenance and management.