The Nationwide Implementation of Pavement Prediction Modelling in New Zealand

Abstract

During 1998 the New Zealand (NZ) RIMS Group (Road Information Management Systems) initiated Phase I of a national project titled “Implementation of Predictive Modelling for Road Management”. This representative group comprises members representing all levels of government in NZ including the funding agency. The project arose from the need to implement a credible system that would be used to predict future maintenance and rehabilitation needs for road networks on a long-term basis. An important aspect of this implementation process was to provide a system that was compatible and integrated with the existing RAMM1 inventory and road condition database system used previously for future works programming. The software package dTIMS2 was selected as the appropriate platform due to its inherent flexibility and its open system that allows the user to customize pavement deterioration models or the actual analyses framework. The project to date has been undertaken in three phases, which reflected the objective to get a system up and running as quickly as was possible. Phase I, which ran for 8 months, developed a preliminary system built around dTIMS which used available research and models and was interfaced with RAMM. During this phase, once a working setup was developed, pilot testing and training were performed with five road controlling authorities representing the range of likely users. The objectives of Phase II and Phase III were to refine the system, to address the issues identified during the pilot studies, as well as overseeing the fullscale implementation and training of users throughout NZ.