Keywords: CAD, CALS, XML, UML, GIS, information technology, road administration.

As the policy has been changed from land construction to land management and the construction CALS/EC has been improved, advanced information management is required in road construction works as well. The road administration information to be managed includes the information of the road at the stages of planning and design, the structure and configuration of the constructed road, the conditions and quality when undergoing construction, traffic services for the users, and the information of repair and improvement. These kinds of information should be shared and utilised throughout the life cycle and is to be more detailed as the road construction works progress. In this study, the road data model is discussed for utilising integrally the CAD data, which is the base of the road information management, and the corresponding attribute data.

The road administration information can be largely categorised into two:

• Structural information that expresses the geometrical configuration of the road, the configuration and sizes of the facility, etc., and
• Attribute information that pertains to their characteristics and quality.

The former is managed in the form of design drawing data and the latter is managed as planning and design information, construction work information, and maintenance and inspection information.

However, in JH, there are problem results from the fact that the drawing data, which expresses geometric information, and attribute information are separately managed.

Therefore, in order to resolve this problem in view of the advancement in the information technology, especially CAD technology, it should be a basic rule for us to produce and manage data in such a manner that the attribute information is associated with the geometric information represented in the drawings.

The data, which is the subject matter here, is the core of the construction and management activities at JH. This means that, by arranging and analysing necessary items of information to make a clear model of the data structure, it would become possible to ensure the consistency among related systems to be developed in the future.

Further, use of the data model to be developed here will provide an easy switchover to a new implementation method even in case of a change of the implementation according to the age, unless there are major changes in the way the road projects are executed. Thus, it would be possible to ensure the continuous availability of the system.

Since the information handled in road projects are varied, it would involve a huge amount of work to create a model that would encompass all required specifications. Therefore, it should be considered appropriate to begin with the sections that are high in demand and are basic, and then to make partial improvements and additions to build the whole model. Thus, in this study, the following conditions have been established for creating the model.

Fundamentally, in order to make into a model the road projects as a whole, the real world road structure and the manpower, organisation, concepts and the like and things that are necessary for conducting road projects should be made into a model in an appropriate manner. However, taking account of purpose of use of the model, and from the viewpoint of developing the basic part of the model, we have chosen the road earthwork as the subject and made it our goal to develop a static model focusing on description of road structures.

Also, for writing the model, we decided to use the Unified Modelling Language (UML) because: it is standardised, it has high describing capability, it is popularly used, and it allows an easy use of the CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) tools in the implementation stage. Thus far, the present situation and problem areas concerning the use of electronic information necessary in road projects has been analysed. At the same time, road data model has been proposed for developing, improving, and utilising the road project data in an integrated manner.

Functions of information systems will vary according to requirements of engineers who use them and progress of information technology. This means that, rather than pursuing what is the effective information system, it is more important to arrange data items in order. Thus, in order to make it possible to arrange information to be shared throughout the life cycle on its production process, and to concretely understand what kind of information is truly needed, we set up "Committee for Designing Specification of Japan Highway Data Model" at the end of FY2000 under the chairpersonship of Hitoshi Furuta, Professor at the Department of Informatics, Kansai University.

1

H. Takahasi, M. Yamasaki, and T. Hongo, "Development, and Utilisation of Information Relating to Roads, Compilation of the 25th Symposium on Civil Engineering Information System 2000, Civil Engineering Information System Committee, Civil Engineering Association.

2

Pierson Education Corp, "Database Application Design; Database application development technique using object oriented modelling"

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