Keywords: expressway, information property, CALS, product model, pavement, XML, UML.

Fifty years ago, the construction of Japan's expressway started and now its total length is almost 7200km. The amount of data realting to the expressway that has been accumulated has become large. By the development of various mainstay systems, IT has been introduced into the expressway construction work, but a serious problem is the imperfectness of the use of the data due to defects of the system interface and data sharing. In addition to this, because organizations lie scattered across the whole country, much data accumulated earlier still remains in either the paper medium or on individual electronic data at the individual organization. Therefore, to break such inefficient and unutilized situations we study a new model for management systems, which can utilize valuable expressway information from the past during every business process.

The data accumulated related to the expressway has basic elements such as time, location, period, subject and construction method. In order to arrange this data efficiently, each project data phase of planning, design, construction, maintenance and so forth is linked to an object oriented data model system called the JHDM (Japan highway data model) which models expressway structures citekusano:1. For example, at the management phase of the pavement maintenance reconstruction proceeds by judging the results of the inspection for damage and the past maintenance records. In the case of searching various past maintenance records, we still not have the function system that specifies and retrieves such data by the location information (objects) on the expressway.

Including these cases, we investigated the MSRIP (management system of road information property), which manages the information property of the expressway. Some data of information properties are still not converted to electronic format; however, in spite of paper or individual electronic data, depending on this system, the execution history concerned with the construction period, the job lists and so forth which were done at a specific location in a time series can be easily grasped by the registration as object information.

Specifically, compared to the former two-dimension information retrieval system, the additional location information and time axis, it has become possible to store, save and retrieve the data in three dimensions. Also, this data can be commoditized without a particular registration operation and when new information is generated, it can be shared and exchanged at once within all organizations. This is rather revolutionary for worldwide IT processes. Moreover, not only improving the efficiency of the various businesses, but also effective utilization of this system to improve cost performance can contribute to business progress by analyzing dead data which can not be found so far by the statistical methods.

1

M. Yamasaki, T. Hong, Y. Chiba, "A Fundamental Study of Developing Japan Highway Data Model", Journal of Applied Computing in Civil Engineering, Vol.10, 33-42, 2001.

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