Graphics approaches to pavement management systems (PMS) offer a substantial improvement in the early acceptance and accessibility of the road data systems presently available. Using graphics can help gain the co-operation of the critical participants - the field divisional engineering staff of the road authorities. This process has been substantially accelerated by field testing of various graphics user interfaces for PMS, which enable district and divisional staff to observe and respond to the immediate uses to which even their present data could be put, the simplicity of reexpressing it in a useful format, and the potential of maintaining an improved data base of their own area for pavement management purposes. The Apple Macintosh provided a suitable environment for flexible prototyping and field testing before implementing the final system. A commercial graphics object-oriented data base system has been applied to produce a small prototype to illustrate how this approach can be put into practice at very low cost and with little training. The approach is illustrated by some of the prototype displays for a Division of the Road Construction Authority in Victoria. The relationships are discussed between this demonstration system and the major thrust of the field PMS system now being developed at the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) using the large-scale oracle relational data base on MS-DOS and UNIX computer systems. These have now been selected as the initial delivery and development vehicles for PMS work at ARRB. A progressive line of development based on integrated graphics data bases for PMS is outlined. A Macintosh disk containing a self-running, commentated slide show is available from ARRB to complement this and previous papers.
Samenvatting