Automated Data Acquisition and Planning of Highway Construction

This paper briefly describes a model, designed to automate data acquisition and analysis for planning and scheduling highway construction projects. The paper briefly describes the proposed model, and focuses primarily on its automation aspects. Geographic information systems is employed to analyze spatial data and estimate cut and fill quantities. The model also stores activities typically involved in highway construction and automatically generates the precedence network respecting job logic. The model generates digital terrain models to represent the ground topography and underlying soil strata. Transition of soil strata between borehole locations can either be: 1) automatically generated by the model; or 2) defined by the user. The model employs the mass haul diagram to develop the optimum earthmoving plan. It accounts for the presence of transverse obstructions, such as rivers and existing highways, when developing the earthmoving plan and defining project activities. The model is implemented in a prototype software that operates in Microsoft Windows environment. It provides a user-friendly interface, including menus, dialog windows, and graphical capabilities to expedite data input and retrieval. Several input and output formats are accepted to facilitate data sharing with commercially-available software packages.