This document describes the main functionalities, features, information workflow and elements of a Decision Support System for highway maintenance planning related with the automation of road maintenance technologies, proposing some guidelines for its implementation.
In particular, this CWA defines a Decision Support System for the optimal planning of road maintenance interventions and resources, moving towards advanced maintenance strategies. The Decision Support System’s purpose is to provide condition analysis, prioritizations of maintenance activities and to suggest maintenance plans and work orders from the analysis of data.
Different Artificial Intelligence, simulations, predictions and optimizations techniques can be applied for this scope however, the main desired functionalities can be identified and some guidelines for their development are given.
The following guidelines are specified:
- Guidelines to select the needed inputs related with the infrastructure condition and traffic data.
- Guidelines to define the platform components including a data analysis module.
- Guidelines to define the information flow between the components.
- Guidelines for choosing the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related with the traffic and the impact on final users, the status of the asset or the maintenance performance.
- Guidelines for outputs visualisation by the infrastructure manager in an easy and user-friendly interface.
The Decision Support System for the optimal maintenance planning is developed to improve the availability and reliability of the infrastructure. Infrastructure condition aspects as well as operational aspects are used in the maintenance plan elaboration for predictive planning, booking of road possession and work zones management. To define the active work zones, the road sections to be maintained and the optimal allocation of maintenance interventions to time intervals should be defined considering traffic flows.