A framework of pavement management system based on IoT and big data

doi:10.1016/j.aei.2020.101226

Advanced Engineering Informatics

Volume 47, January 2021, 101226

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2020.101226 Get rights and content

Abstract

With the expansion of urban road network, the importance of road maintenance is increasing, which guarantee the operation efficiency of transportation infrastructure. Compare to road construction, road maintenance is more sophisticated. Even though invested a lot of manpower and financial resources, management departments are troubled by insufficient and lagging road maintenance. The development and widely application of technologies including IoT, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence(AI) in various industries offer possible solutions to this issue. However, how to utilize these technologies is a challenge for related administration department because of their weak technical force. To address the problem, a pavement management system(PMC) is developed in this research. Combined with IoT and big data, the PMS provide an overall management structure of road maintenance. Composed of three subsections: Pavement detection and 3D modeling, Data analysis and Decision support, the PMS offer an automated and intelligent solution to related administrative departments and firms. Besides, two road maintenance related firms, one is a road maintenance company and the other is a technical firm that offer smart solutions to road maintenance, are selected as cases to illustrate how PMS are applied to support the daily operations and road maintenance.

Introduction

In the urban infrastructure system, road infrastructure is one of the most important components. It plays an important role in city’s effective operation and sustainable development. In the past decade in China, the substantial input in road infrastructure increase the integrity of road infrastructure, which support the transportation needs in line with the speed of development. However, having built a large scale of road infrastructure, the management of deteriorated road become a challenge for administration department. The low efficiency of pavement maintenance decrease the serviceability of transportation system. It result in the inconvenience of residents’ travel activities and waste of money and resources. More seriously, the road deterioration such as cracks may result in traffic accidents [1]. In the long run, the sustainable development will be restricted. It urges related administrators search for approaches to solve the problem.

In China, massive funds was invested in road maintenance every year. According to Ministry of Transport of China, the average amount of road maintenance expense was 43.2 billion per year. The money was underutilized and led to fiscal burden. To allocate limited resources, the evaluation of the road condition is an essential procedure. Traditionally, it mainly relies on the manual visual inspection [2]. The large number of road and the complexity of road network make the road condition evaluation a tough job. Besides, the road condition evaluation are based on expertise and experience of inspectors, which varies among different people. Insufficient of manpower and the inaccuracy of their work result in poor performance of road condition evaluation. Thus, administrators do not receive enough support when they make decisions. Inevitably, some deteriorated roads were not maintained timely, which may accelerate road deterioration. Meanwhile, some roads were maintained repeatedly even though the condition is normal.

In an era of digitalization, the mismatch between low-efficiency maintenance of transportation infrastructure and the need of increasing number of vehicles should be resolved. Information technology can support the management of civil infrastructure systems in a sustainable way, which relays on both human wisdom and data [3]. The maintenance including technical and administrative activities to keep the infrastructure condition in an acceptable level. Under the background of disruptive technology development, digital revolution is happening in traditional fields, including infrastructure construction and management area [4]. The emerging disruptive technology like Big Data, Internet of Things(IoT) and Artificial Intelligence(AI) invigorate the infrastructure system [5]. As an important branch of infrastructure system, the road maintenance draw attention of researchers in the past few years. A portion of researchers innovatively proposed approaches that can identify road distress from pavement pictures [6], [7], [8]. They offered feasible automated approaches of pavement detection, which may replace the manual inspection and increase management efficiency significantly. Another kind of research is about system optimization based on OR techniques to decrease expenses or increase efficiency [9], [10], [11], [12]. Existing research demonstrated the effectiveness of technologies such as IoT and big data on road maintenance.

However, for most cities, in the process of digital transformation, the road maintenance lack a systematic workflow that contains data acquisition, data analysis and decision support. Previous studies focus on very specific problems. Even though their findings may improve the efficiency of road maintenance to some degree, they did not mention how to embedded these techniques into the whole road maintenance system. The gaps exists between their research and real world application. The road management system is composed of various functional modules. The operation efficiency not only depends on single module’s efficiency, but also depends on coordination efficiency between different modules and adaptation to the whole operation processes and environment. Existing researches lack an overall perspective analysis of road maintenance system.

The aim of this study is to develop solutions to road maintenance departments and help them overcome existing challenges by taking advantage of IoT and Big Data. Meanwhile, this study will fill the research gaps mentioned above. We develop a Pavement Management System(PMS) that integrally upgrade the road maintenance system from the traditional operation mode into an intelligent and automated mode. Combining the available techniques and facilities with traditional operation process, PMS makes it clearly and concisely for related administrative department to upgrade. Besides, from the perspective of city’s general efficiency, the PMS is open to other related digital infrastructure system to realize collaborative improvement.

Section snippets

Basic functional modules of PMS

Supported by IoT, big data and AI, digitalization heralding a data-driven, automated and ultimately, a smart world in the future. Based on this, the PMS should be upgrade from traditional pattern and contain more intelligence. To build up an efficient PMS, not only functional requirements should be considered, the “smartness” is also important. The “smartness” means internal coordination between sub-departments and external coordination with other systems such as Building Information

Pavement detection and 3D modeling

Pavement detection is the basic and the beginning of the whole process. The existing technology can help management department get rid of low efficiency of manpower. To meet the need of data collection, various sensors including 3D pavement information acquisition equipment, high-definition camera and other needed equipment like encoder, GPS, etc. are equipped in detection vehicles. Manual inspection will be replaced by detection vehicles. By regular patrol, multidimensional data are collected

Case study

Two firms were selected as cases of this study to illustrate the application of the proposed framework. The two firms are Beijing Municipal Bridge Maintenance Management Group Co.Ltd and Beijing Truelion Technology Co., Ltd.. The former one is responsible for road management in Beijing. The company’s backward operation cannot finish heavy workload efficiently and cannot meet the maintenance need of complex road network in Beijing. The study of this company will reveal constraints and weakness

Conclusion

Road infrastructure is key component of urban city. The ever-increasing traffic mileage and the increasing requirements for transportation capacity have all put test on the level of road infrastructure management and maintenance. Road maintenance extends the lifecycle of roads, ensures the performance of the road infrastructure, and offers safe and reliable service to residents.

In the future, the technological development of the road maintenance will become a major factor restricting the

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers 71532013, 71871210 and 71850014).

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A framework of pavement management system based on IoT and big data

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Basic functional modules of PMS

Pavement detection and 3D modeling

Case study

Conclusion

Declaration of Competing Interest

Acknowledgements

Adv. Eng. Inf.

Adv. Eng. Inf.

Autom. Constr.

Adv. Eng. Inf.

Adv. Eng. Inf.

Adv. Eng. Inf.

Adv. Eng. Inf.

Adv. Eng. Inf.

Struct. Saf.