Integrating New and Existing Systems for Departments of Transportation

Departments of transportation throughout the United States and Canada are responsible for more than just managing their physical road systems. Their authorities extend into data management and agencywide collaboration on data accuracy, accessibility, and regulatory compliance to maintain inventory and perform asset management.

Enter the critical importance of a road network management system. The more agencies and organizations integrate data, data sources, and existing technology, the more streamlined workflows, informed decision-making, and efficient business processes can become to better meet the needs of their citizens and the traveling public.

What is a Road Network Management System?

A road network management system goes beyond managing physical roads; it encompasses the location, direction, use, and condition of each route and its assets. This technology integrates with existing systems, combining various data sources into a cohesive platform, enabling agency leaders and planners to make data-driven decisions. One method to track data along the road network is a linear referencing system (LRS), a topic we explored in a recent blog on linear referencing.

ArcGIS Roads and Highways

As the global leader in geographic information systems (GIS) software, Esri® ArcGIS Roads and Highways — a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) linear referencing software product — is a road network management system that efficiently manages disparate data sources using the geography of the roadways as the commonality. ArcGIS Roads and Highways allows transportation agencies to maintain and integrate enterprise LRS data with GIS maps to understand the road network comprehensively.

Features include:

Physical road inventory data (number of lanes and pavement type) and administrative data (functional classification and maintenance jurisdiction).
Temporal data capabilities for routes, calibration points, and event data.
Synchronized route and event data updates based on configurable behaviors (stay put, move, snap, cover, and retire).
Data validation with event checks, attribute rules, and other spatial and SQL-based quality control steps.
Data, existing systems, and GIS integrations with representational state transfer (REST) services and geoprocessing scripts.

Implementation Process

Implementing a new enterprise system that references road inventory data and asset data (sign inventory, drainage structures, etc.) requires careful consideration. This system can serve as the data integration backbone for other business systems and software applications and provide opportunities for long-term data standardization and process efficiencies.

A representation of how data flows in four sections: source data, data staging, data warehouse, and information systems. — Data standardization enhances data integration throughout all business systems.

Key implementation factors include:

Key Implementation Factor	ArcGIS Roads and Highways Capabilities
How does your organization define a route? Is that definition flexible enough to meet future maintenance, analysis, and reporting needs?	ArcGIS Roads and Highways can support a variety of route ID and route name configurations.
What approach is best for your agency to measure a route with calibrated/driven distances or geometric lengths?	Inherently, the software provides outcomes based on the digitized centerline, but a user-defined calibrated measure can override this. ArcGIS Roads and Highways supports either approach based on the organization’s needs.
What data standards exist for your agency’s road inventory and asset data?	Implementing a new or upgraded enterprise system provides an opportunity to establish or refine standards with data modeling and normalization options (tabular, spatial, and temporal). Using ArcGIS Roads and Highways data helps publish and encourage standards to other systems.

To make the most of the implementation process, transportation agencies should evaluate business processes and data models and consider enhancing them to fully leverage ArcGIS Roads and Highways’ capabilities. ArcGIS Roads and Highways’ integrated system integrates road inventory, and asset data increases staff time efficiencies and data analytics capabilities.

Benefits and Cost Advantages

Incorporates natively with the GIS environment.
Reduces IT maintenance and operations overhead.
Eliminates application source code maintenance.
Integrates with industry partners and other DOTs and is supported by Esri.
Integrates systems and data processes via services, scripts, and application programming interfaces (APIs).
Enhanced data access and availability via the GIS ecosystem.
Condenses data editing and maintenance time with intuitive user interfaces and data editing synchronization.
Augments data analysis, reporting, and visualization opportunities.

LRS Structure

When considering the LRS structure, it’s critical to consider the entirety of your community’s transportation network. This network often extends beyond the roads maintained by the agency, encompassing multiple transportation modes. Including supplementary data from these additional modes significantly enhances your data.

A diagram of the transportation network components: AADT, number of lanes, speed limit, and pavement condition. — An LRS network has multiple components that can be supported with location referencing and GIS tools.

The LRS network is composed of several key components: centerlines, calibration points, routes, and events. Each of these plays a vital role in supporting multiple needs related to location referencing and GIS tools.

Additionally, using various linear referencing methods (LRMs) is essential. LRMs facilitate a variety of use cases, including data collection, maintenance, analysis, and reporting. All these activities are supported based upon a single enterprise LRS, such as ArcGIS Roads and Highways, ensuring comprehensive transportation network management.

Road Inventory and Event Management

Leveraging an LRS enhances managing road inventory and events. This system allows for synchronous route and road inventory data updates within the ArcGIS Roads and Highways framework and in conjunction with other business systems, effectively bridging the gap between internal and external events.

A key to this process is empowering business data owners to maintain and manage their information, which can be facilitated through user-friendly, web-based interfaces like the Event Editor and various tools and geoprocesses. These resources enable maintaining road inventory and asset data along the LRS, promoting a distributed multiuser environment that effectively reduces an organization’s silos of excellence.

Moreover, validating business data to ensure its quality and reliability is crucial. The available tools and processes — including attribute rules, domain values, and reviewer jobs — allow users to conduct thorough data entry, cross-data layer and table checks, and verifications, which is instrumental in reinforcing data quality and reliability, ensuring a robust and dependable road inventory and event management system.

System Integration

Benefits of system integration include enhancing the utility and accessibility of route and road inventory data. With the LRS as the foundational backbone for location referencing, agencies can employ various LRMs. These methods are instrumental for collecting and inspecting data in the field, incorporating it into systems, and enabling comprehensive analysis and reporting. These capabilities are readily accessible through out-of-the-box API calls and configurable geoprocesses.

ArcGIS Roads and Highways allows you to engage with the data according to your specific business needs. Integration requirements vary since it operates in a transaction environment designed with a specific purpose. Some scenarios require live data accessible through web services. In contrast, others — focused on data stability and modeling — may benefit more from a publication database and a different set of web services.

Additionally, leveraging the dynamic segmentation and linear overlay processes, especially when combined with the temporal capabilities of ArcGIS Roads and Highways, unlocks significant advances, allowing systems and end-users to combine data in new and innovative ways.

Continue Your Digital Transformation Journey

Incorporating ArcGIS Roads and Highways into the data management infrastructure of state, regional, and local DOTs marks a significant step toward enhanced collaboration, streamlined workflows, and cost-efficient operations. As road networks become more complex, leveraging innovative solutions like ArcGIS Roads and Highways becomes imperative for the sustainable development of transportation systems. When paired with the other data collection, real-time, visualization, and analysis tools available in the GIS and business intelligence ecosystem, one of your agency’s biggest assets – data – will truly be realized.

Diver deeper in our free webcast, “How Esri® ArcGIS Roads and Highways Helps Transportation Agencies Harness the Power of Data,” and earn PDH, CMCI, and GISP credit.

GeoDecisions Blog

Increasing Data Collaboration With Esri Roads and Highways