Expanding the Use of Pavement Condition Data through Knowledge Discovery in Databases

Pavement management systems (PMS) help transportation agencies make pavement maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation decisions. Given the amount of data collected from pavements every year and the extent of information associated with managing pavements, one of the basic requirements of a PMS is a comprehensive database. Other components of the PMS include analysis routines, report generation modules, and a feedback mechanism. These components rely on the use of models to predict future network conditions, assess rehabilitation needs and costs, and select effective rehabilitation strategies. Deterioration models depend on the quality of data used for their development. Therefore, it is important that the database contain reliable, objective and appropriate information to support decision-making for planning and budgeting as well as to support the development of deterioration models. Ideally, a PMS database would contain enough data to satisfy all the requirements for developing such models; however, in practice, complete databases often are not available.