Transportation is a crucial factor in the developing process, but the performance of the transportation sector is often sub-optimal, due to a lack of maintenance or demand-inadequate infrastructure provision. Transportation policy and the evaluation of policy alternatives aimed at improving this situation have to be based on up-to-date and reliable information about the transportation infrastructure and its usage integrated in transportation management and information systems. Generally speaking the tasks of transportation information systems may be defined broadly as: infrastructure management including the planning, building and maintenance of infrastructure and the evaluation of policy alternatives and; managing the usage of infrastructure including models of transport demand and traffic counts, models for network planning and for the organisation of network maintenance and defining and controlling the legal and economic framework for infrastructure use. These tasks define the information needs of these management systems and have to be contrasted with the information situation, which often has to be characterised as one of : low data availability; heterogeneous data and corresponding problems with data reliability; differing data requirements (e.g. details of infrastructure condition and seasonal influences). This paper discusses different methods for building reliable (GIS)-database and sketches a stepwise implementation process. Besides technical problems different data requirements and the organisational and institutional frameworks will be taken into account. The methods for the generation and updating of the database will increasingly rely on methods of remote sensing. This is due to the technological advances in this field, as well as the increasing availability of data and the methods of data processing. The necessary steps for creating and maintaining a reliable database can be found by complementing organisational measures, creating information as by-products of already implemented road administration procedures. Experiences from different developing and industrial nations will be compared in order to define best-practice models and avoid foreseeable problems. The basic features necessary in the implementation of the management systems can be summed up as : simple and extensible data structures (based on standards; possibility of country wide standard definitions and international data exchange); methods for the automated building and update of the database, (remote sensing and GPS-support enhanced to service process based information creation) ; simple instruments (visualization and database management) based on standard-GIS and database-systems at the start and an extensible system architecture (spatial detail in databases on a regional and sub-regional level, interfaces to more complex methods, e.g. transportation planning packages). Existing information bases face the challenges of information provision and deployment as well as methods and questions of information access. Low investment costs, high reliability and ease-of information are shown to be crucial for information provision and usage. Systems and techniques for information access and information visualisation/querying/analysis/reporting will be shown and evaluated in examples. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Abstract