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PAVEMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Road Maintenance and Pavement Management System
Pavement management system or PMS is a term that relates to a system that utilizes the condition coding of roadways coupled with the identification of strategies to determine maintenance or re-construction activities. PMS is "a system which involves the identification of optimum strategies at various management levels and maintains pavements at an adequate level of serviceability. These include, but are not limited to, systematic procedures for scheduling maintenance and rehabilitation activities based on optimization of benefits and minimization of costs (Wikipedia). It is therefore a planning tool that is able to model pavement and surface deterioration due to the effects of traffic and environmental ageing, and contains a series of decision units used to determine how and when to repair the roads surface based on various tests.
PMS as an important tool has been incorporated into the road maintenance programme designed by the Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (LAMATA). Road Maintenance Programme practised before in LAMATA involved carrying out condition survey of the road and commissioning the Design and Construction of the road with little consideration for the economic benefit to be derived from building such a road. Initially, much attention was not paid to the Social and Environmental factors in the consideration for the Maintenance of the road. Some times Roads are even built to compensate rather than serve any economic use.
Strategy
It then became imperative to find and adopt a decision-making support tool for planning road investments; hence, the development of a Pavement Management System, which would suit the environment and effectively aid decision-making as a tool for planning road investments.
The task includes reviewing the current road management practices and the current data collections methods and procedures in order to evaluate the role of the PMS as a decision support system for planning road investments. The activities will allow us to identify the data collection requirements and to develop a strategy for the sustainability of the system.
For us in LAMATA, we will use the PMS for creating a database containing road inventory, engineering and economic data of the road network as well as getting to know the state of the road and related infrastructure. The PMS would be deployed to achieve the following:
- plan and programme road investments.
- create detailed work plans for maintenance, rehabilitation and reconstruction.
- simulate the effects of any improvements on the future condition and performance of the road system
- systematic approach to decision-making within a consistent and defined framework.
- Optimize road treatments under a multi-criteria framework, so as to maximise benefits under a budget constraint.
- evaluate budget requirements to obtain current and future levels of service for the roads and quantify the required amount of resources: equipment, materials and personnel for maintenance activities.
Implementation of PMS
Part of the objectives of LAMATA are to formulate and implement policies and strategies, plan, coordinate, and manage activities and programmes that will produce and sustain a holistic, efficient and effective public transportation system. Keeping in mind the above it is understandable that the implementation of a road management system in the State should be centralized, promoted and coordinated by LAMATA. Two main elements must be followed to guarantee that the implementation of the PMS in Lagos State is done adequately: the use of standardized criteria, and the implementation of a training program.
Results
Fifty kilometre of the declared road network selected for pilot project for the development of PMS Software have been treated. It involved data collection carried out on these roads and entered into the database of the PMS.
The roads are linked by segments and chained into projects and these have been evaluated and assigned Engineering alternatives and economic indices.
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