Integrating Floating Car Data in a Pavement Management System: Some empirical evidence from Brescia (Italy)

Road maintenance is essential to ensure the optimal functioning of roads and provide safety and comfort to road users. Objective and technical data play a crucial role in optimizing strategies and can support the monitoring, evaluation, and implementation of specific actions to improve the activities. Current literature provided uses and descriptions of the Pavement Management System (PMS), a way to check road conditions, figure out cost-effective ways to keep them in good shape, and suggest actions within a budget. The PMS keeps tabs on work, materials, equipment, and costs, using either software or expert advice to recommend budget-friendly strategies based on conditions, surface type, and available funds. However, the integration of PMS with continuous and automated monitoring using Floating Car Data (FCD) is missing from the research results. Therefore, this study proposes a framework for integrating and handling traffic and pavement data from heterogeneous sources. Establishing a centralized orchestrator and implementing a robust data pipeline is crucial to managing the data involved in road maintenance effectively. An initial application explores FCD integrated into the PMS on the Province of Brescia (Italy) roads. The results show that each data source can intercept some road surface anomalies. Therefore, using different data sources is essential to obtain significant information. Thus, the proposed framework allows continuous monitoring of the state of the road network. This research emphasizes the fundamental role of a well-designed structure to enable efficient work with more and different data sets from heterogeneous sources. It can be implemented in a Decision Support System for the expert decision-maker.