Keywords: product modeling, maintenance, pavement planning, object-oriented database, simulation, data model.

Today Central Nippon Expressway Company Limited (formerly the Japanese Highway) are constructing ARM3 (Advance Road Maintenance Management Method) to carry out road maintenance efficiently and systematically based on RIMS (the Road Maintenance Information System). However, Maintenance and Customer Service Centre, which overseas the repair of disintegrating roads, must address unforeseen road damage, which increases year by year and they have to take emergency action to protect safety. Therefore, they implemented road maintenance ahead of agreed costs and placed great emphasis on project execution. Especially, for pavement projects, pavement improvement is being squeezed by emergency pavement maintenance costs. Based on these situations, a new maintenance plan should be developed to achieve a premeditated maintenance management strategy that adjusts to the situation of the local road structure and improves the plan's accuracy.

Management of the road structure assessment index is different from road quality, in that the construction condition, time lapse and condition before it improves (by inspection or investigation) must be considered. Therefore, the operating units for individual road structures, requires a new assessment index to put in place, in addition to the standard assessment index, then priorities are simulated for the degree of each assessment index. Subsequently they adopt and evaluate the method, which is the most suitable for the road structure.

Also, they must establish a revised system and evaluate a plan of influence on the maintenance plan due to unforeseen road damage, and the relationship between KPI instead of manual labour. During maintenance and repair of the road structure, we examine an adoptable maintenance and repair method including new methods for each unit of management, and consider mid/long-term LCC of each construction method then enforce the plan that brings permanent cost performance and impacts on the road structure under consideration. Also, one must consider the effect between road structures in addition to an examination of the road structure unit, then evaluate the road as a structure to obtain the maximum effect on the plan of execution.

To undertake such an approach, existing spreadsheet software methods require much time and effort, and there is a limit to the execution of correction of the plan manually. Therefore, we propose a PSS (Pavement Supporting System) that manages the data by units of road structure, reviews the plan and agrees a new assessment index, statistical analysis, priority order, and simulations. The database required for PSS is JHDM (Japan-Highway Data Model) [1,2], which is an object-oriented database mechanism that organically incorporates all kinds of data that relates to units of road structure. Utilizing input data from RIMS or existing business data, it automatically formulates a plan from the business data available. Globally, in the future, the number of worn road structures will increase, and appropriately repairing and managing these structures will become an urgent matter.

1

M. Yamasaki, T. Hongo, Y. Chiba, "A Fundamental Study of Developing Japan Highway Data Model", Journal of Civil Engineering Information Processing System, Vol. 10, 33-42, 2001.

2

K. Yasuda, K. Oino, M.Yamasaki, "Development of the Prototype System for the Drawing of Road Management with Attribute Data", Journal of Applied Computing in Civil Engineering, Vol. 12, 79-86, 2003.

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