Highway Maintenance Data Collection: State of the Art

Existing procedures for recording highway maintenance and field inventory data re laborious and time consuming because the information is entered twice - first on standard paper forms by the field maintenance crew leaders or general supervisors, then on other summary sheets or a computer by office clerks for data consolidation and /or posting to timesheets, budget balances, payroll, accounting, equipment and materials inventory, maintenance management system and other databases. In addition, manual data entry procedures are subject to human mistakes, inaccurate reporting and incomplete data. This paper describes improvements to maintenance data acquisition using innovative technologies explored and demonstrated in a two-phase National Cooperative Highway Research Program Project 14-10 titled Improvements in Data Acquisition Technology for Maintenance Systems.