Integrating Highway Projects Data in GIS for Maintenance and Rehabilitation Planning: Applications, Challenges, and Recommendations

Over the past two decades, highway agencies have been using geographic information systems (GIS) to store, visualize, and analyze highway-related issues. The fusion of projects information residing in disparate highway data sources can yield useful information to support highway maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) planning. Through a case study, this study presents applications for projects data fusion in a GIS, identifies data integration challenges, and proposes recommendations on data management practices. Potential applications for integrating highway projects information in GIS: including spatio-temporal conflict analyses and pro-active scheduling of M&R projects can lead to the obviation of costly planning errors. Furthermore, the study identifies data integration issues including data granularity, missing data, semantic interoperability, and discordant use formats. Based on these challenges, this paper proposes the development of data “validation rules,” and pro-active data entry efforts to improve projects data fusion in GIS. The insights from this study can provide directions for future research in pushing the frontiers of data integration of projects data in GIS and its subsequent applications for M&R project planning.