Keywords: management, geotechnical, investigation, geotechnical design, call-up contract, outsourcing, GIS.

Egnatia Motorway is a 680 km long road in northern Greece (estimated budget 3,300 MEURO) stretching from the Ionian port of Igoumenitsa, in the west, where ferries link to the Italian motorway network, to the Greek/Turkish border, in the east. It is part of the European Transport Network and one of the 14 transport project priorities of European Union, providing the European Union industrial centers access to the East with no border crossings. Egnatia Odos S.A. (EOAE) is the company responsible for the design, construction and operation of the motorway. Although it is a state company (the single shareholder is the Greek Ministry of Public Works), it was set up as a private sector company with officials from the Greek Ministry of Public Works, an international Project Manager (Brown & Root) and three international consortia of Construction Managers, following competition. The main funding sources are the European Union, the European Investment Bank and the Greek state. Most of the sections are currently under construction with some sections already completed.

Geotechnics comprises all the necessary geotechnical activities for the design, construction and maintenance of earthworks, and structure and pavement foundations. The management of geotechnics is a fundamental aspect of the project and presents significant difficulties as it is related to ground conditions and to all their inherent complexities with respect to investigation, simulation, risk assessment and control during construction. This is particularly true for Egnatia motorway project where especially complex ground conditions, mainly in its western and central part, must be engineered based on limited internal resources and within the restricted time set by the funding agents. A further degree of difficulty is added by the fact that the Greek Public Work environment in the geotechnical field has proved inappropriate in particular relative to the size of the project, which is the largest ever in Greece.

The strategic decisions taken by EOAE aimed at overcoming the aforementioned difficulties and delivering geotechnicals works of high quality on time and cost-effectively. These were, firstly, to allocate a larger proportion of the project budget to geotechnical investigation and design works in order to minimize the geotechnical problems during construction and operation, and secondly, to reinforce the control of the geotechnical activities by making extensive use of external resources. A management system was subsequently established in which a control activity is assigned to each main geotechnical activity required for the completion of any specific geotechnical work through the design, implementation and maintenance phase. Although the geotechnical discipline of the Design Department of EOAE is the core of the control activities related to design and monitoring, external resources are extensively used. Such resources were external design managers, external reviewers, site (investigation) supervisors and experts in case of difficult ground conditions where expert advice or endorsement of design proposals is required. For the function of the established management system for geotechnics a number of supportive activities were performed associated with the preparation of operating procedures and work instructions, specifications and standards, as well as briefs for geotechnical investigation and design contracts.

EOAE in establishing the above system for geotechnics used an integrated approach with respect to the previous system of Public Works in Greece. It proceeded to changes of the previous system in the domain of geotechnical investigation, geotechnical design and geotechnical instrument monitoring which are described and discussed in the paper. The resulted system was audited, evaluated and improved where necessary. The established integrated system has achieved increased quality in geotechnical investigation and design, as well as rapidity and flexibility in the time management with an immediate positive effect of less problematic construction and operation of the motorway. It also contributed in expanding the application of advanced techniques and methods in the domain of geotechnical works and the promotion of the Greek geotechnical investigation, design and construction industry.

For the storing, handling, and fast and easy display of the large amount of geological and geotechnical data, a particular application of GIS, the GeoGIS (Geological-Geotechnical GIS) was developed, tested in a pilot section, and is currently under expansion for all the sections of the motorway. The connection of GeoGIS with the geotechnical instrument monitoring database is considered to be of great value during operation and maintenance.

1

EOAE, "OSMEO: Guidelines for conducting road work designs", October 1998.

2

Greek Presidential Decree (P.D.) 696/74, "Fees of Engineers for designs, supervision, delivery etc. of Traffic, Hydraulic and Building Works, as well as of Topographic, Land Survey and Mapping Works and technical specifications of designs" as amended and completed by the P.D. 515/89.

3

J.P. Kimmance, M.P. Bradshaw, and H.H. Seetoh, "Geographical Information System (GIS) Application to Contsruction and Geotechnical Data Management on MRT Construction Projects in Singapore", in "Tunneling and Underground Space Technology", Vol. 14, No 4, pp 469- 479, 1999. doi:10.1016/S0886-7798(00)00009-2

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