A Pavement Surface Model for Integrating Automated Management Data Available to Purchase

Good data on performance, geometry, materials, environment, costs and other factors provides the foundation for pavement management. While some very advanced technologies have been applied to collecting this data, particularly in non-contact sensing and automation, there is unfortunately also a very wide diversity and incompatibility among methods and results. This paper suggests that such diverse data and technologies can in fact be exploited in a standardized way through the use of an integrated surface representation model. An example application of the model is provided in the paper. It uses data from three current acquisition systems. Data from these systems are integrated into the model's standard representation from which common pavement condition indices are derived using the model's tools. The paper also describes additional benefits of the model in pavement management.