A critical process for the timely development and delivery of highway construction projects is early identification and depiction of utility interests that may interfere with proposed highway facilities. The effective management of such utility interests or conflicts involves utility adjustment (or design changes), inspection, and documentation. The large number of stakeholders and the magnitude of the process results in enormous amounts of data. Despite substantial data exchange between stakeholders, currently no standards exist for exchange of utility data/information in the project development process. Using sample data provided by Texas Department of Transportation, research described in this paper addresses this issue by analyzing specific utility conflict data/information flows between utility accommodation stakeholders and data needs for the management of utility conflicts that occur during highway construction projects. The paper presents the product of this analysis, which is a prototype system for the management of utility conflict data called Utility Accommodation and Conflict Tracker.
Abstract