Assessment of kinematic GPS in updating road databases

Abstract

For a road management policy to correctly handle road maintenance and optimisation as well as road network development issues, it needs to rely on a continuously and correctly updated road system database. Urban planners and road managers need accurate and updated data in order to deliver quality urban services and sound decision-making. However, in practice, updating the road database has significant risks of loss of information or inconsistency in the road data. Oran, the main city of the west of Algeria, has a road network which is in continual metamorphosis. Oran represents an adequate study site for evaluating the contribution of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and very high resolution satellite images to updating the road database (RDB) of the city. The approach developed in this paper aims at detecting the changes in the road network and integrating them automatically in a referenced RDB. We will evaluate the use of kinematic GPS in road data capture and integration in the RDB and will present innovative methods available in this field and the results they deliver. Findings deduced from this method and the potential for further innovation will also be described. In addition, an application integrating the updating mechanisms was designed in a geographical information system (GIS) environment, and validated with data extracted from the RDB; this application will be outlined in this paper. We will principally describe the effect of third dimension integration by GPS. This effect is very important for the enrichment of the RDB. This will allow a full settling up on our database and on the possible efficiency of the introduced elements into this base. For these reasons, we have developed a data integration technique, with examples of two important roads: the main road RN11 and the secondary road CW46.