GIS technology for enhancing pavement maintenance and condition assessment: Case study

Highways are one of the most crucial infrastructure elements for any city. It is of high importance to keep them maintained to the high performance. This might need to establish a road maintenance department for the continued inspection and decision making. Spatial technologies, such as GIS, are particularly useful for integrating roadway data and enhancing their use and presentation for highway management and operation through the use of spatial relationships and maps. This paper presents a GIS-based system that serves as a platform for all aspects of the pavement condition assessment and maintenance. The resulting map system can enhance the maintenance process significantly by visualising the whole network with the state condition of each section. This paper examines the condition of road sections for a selected area in Al-Qassim, a city to the south of Babylon governorate. These road sections have varying condition states resulting from many factors such as weathering, insufficient drainage, ageing, traffic load, and lack of routine maintenance. The overall condition index (OCI) is used to assess the state of each section on a scale of 1 to 10. Most of the studied sections are falling below 5. Two strategies are presented for maintaining and inspecting the network that highway agencies and road engineers could adopt to save money and extend pavement life in a functional manner. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of recording all road information, including construction details, distress type and severity, and maintenance and rehabilitation processes, to inform future actions.