Integrating GPS and GIS technologies to enhance Pavement Management System process: a case study

Pavement condition survey is the backbone of the pavement management system (PMS) successfully implementation, which is one of the highly demanded applications of global positioning system (GPS) surveying and geographic information system (GIS). The aim of this research is to highlight the importance of integrating GPS and GIS technologies to enhance the maintenance decision-making process of pavement management system (PMS). To achieve this objective pavement condition data were collected and analyzed for the ring road (20km length) of Fayoum city, Egypt, which was divided into 25 homogenous sections. The collected data is based on spatial data collected by GPS, visual data taken by digital camera, and data manipulated exploiting GIS. Hand-held GPS receiver was utilized for road cadastre and digital camera was used for gathering semantic information. GPS coordinates were projected on Red Belt projection (the local projection). Commercial GIS software was used for georeferencing surveyed road. Finally, pavement condition index (PCI) value for each section was calculated and relevant maintenance decisions were identified. The study proved that the use of GPS, visual data taken by digital camera and GIS led to have reliable data, which greatly help in evidence-based better decision-making process. This definitely enhances the efficiency of PMS in collecting and analyzing pavement condition data to come up with reliable maintenance decisions in an easy and quick manner.