Despite ever-increasing budget limitations, more effective ways of establishing maintenance and rehabilitation requirements are needed to optimize the use of available highway funds. Like many other state transportation agencies the texas state department of highways and public transportation (sdhpt) already has in-place, analytical tools for assisting state highway engineers in the management of their roadways. The micro-pes package, for example, is a suite of computer programs developed to assist state district engineers with their network level pavement management activities. This analysis package, as the name implies, is implemented on a microcomputer. Because themicro-pes system is modular, it can be expanded to include other pms analysis tools for which the texas sdhpt may have need. A recent survey has revealed an urgent need by the districts for an automated procedure to generate maps highlighting substandard pavement sections. Currently, the production of these maps is a tedious process, accomplished by manually color-coding maps using pavement condition information from the pavement evaluation system (pes) data base. A computerized procedure would assist the engineering districts in the management of their roadways. In this regard, a small-scale study was conducted to evaluate the potential of using geographic information system (gis) technology within the micro-pes environment to satisfy the need of the districts for graphics output capability. A prototypegis module was developed that provided the capability for graphically displaying the output from the existing micro-pes analysis sub-systems. The study demonstrated the applicability of gis as a tool forpavement management. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1261, Geographic information systems 1990.
Abstract