RIOMS: An intelligent system for operation and maintenance of urban roads using spatio-temporal data in smart cities

Abstract

With the construction of smart cities entering a new phase, it is necessary to broaden the requirements of traditional roads to provide efficient operation and maintenance (O&M) services. Existing road infrastructure systems fail to meet intelligent functional O&M requirements since they do not incorporate a unified method to organize and integrate road life-cycle spatio-temporal data. Capitalizing on the developments in AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction) and IS fields, this paper proposes a solution (ICT Artifact) for achieving urban road intelligent O&M following the Design Science Research (DSR) framework. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) proposed method for organizing, collecting and fusing spatio-temporal data of the road’s entire life cycle, based on extended COBie standard to facilitate the linking and interoperability of multi-source heterogeneous data; (2) new Road Operation and Maintenance Functional Requirements (ROMFR) from the perspective of smart cities, which provide a complete definition of road intelligent O&M functional requirements; and (3) based on ROMFR and a new generation of information technologies, the design and implementation of a system named RIOMS (Road intelligent operation and maintenance system) that supports the intelligent functional requirements. The proposed solution has been applied to Yanggao Road (Pudong New Area, Shanghai) as a case study to demonstrate its feasibility and validity. Specifically, the proposed ICT artifact has been utilized in handling typical scenarios of road O&M and its effectiveness has been assessed through survey questionnaire and smart city assessment system.