A Scheme and Application of a Digital Twin-Based Road Pavement Management System

It is necessary to conduct efficient repairs on road pavements by extending the service life of pavements and reducing life cycle costs (LCC). On the other hand, many small and medium-sized local governments and construction enterprises (SMEs) are responsible for road maintenance work, and the sophistication of ICT-based maintenance management technology has not yet progressed. The authors applied digital measurement technology and constructed a pavement management system based on digital twin technology, assuming that (SMEs) can use it. The maintenance cycle of road pavement can be expressed as follows: inspection, diagnosis, action, record, and next inspection. The authors use a digitalized virtual model (digital twin) as the core, acquire (sensing or monitoring) information and inspection results from the actual model existing in the physical space, and store and accumulate them in the virtual model, which becomes the digital twin. We defined a cycle model that accurately predicts the future by analyzing and simulating the data using a mathematical model and aimed to construct a system to realize this model. In this study, we developed a system based on a spatial information infrastructure. The system can display point cloud data generated from images taken by a simple in-vehicle stereo camera, road surface property data from simple laser measurement, and other data in conjunction with spatial information, and its usefulness has been evaluated. The system was developed using QGIS, which is freeware, to make it easy for SMEs to use. In the future, it is necessary to consider introducing a system that can be shared on the cloud for easier use.