GIS based road classification system for low volume roads

Abstract

Highway Engineering becomes prominent towards the latter half of the 20th Century after World War 2. Standards of highway engineering are continuously being improved. Highway Engineers must take into account future traffic flows, design of highway intersections/interchanges, geometric alignment and design, highway pavement materials and design, structural design of pavement thickness, and pavement maintenance. Network analysis in geographical information system (GIS) provides strong decision support for users in searching optimal route, finding the nearest facility and determining the service area. Searching optimal path is an important advanced analysis function in GIS. In present GIS route finding modules, heuristic algorithms have been used to carry out its search strategy. Due to the lack of global sampling in the feasible solution space, these algorithms have considerable possibility of being trapped into local optima. This study presents a methodology of categorizing a low volume road in a network which will be useful for future planning, using the addressed features in GIS application and capability of customizing features through programming language like visual basic 6.0. This also presents a model for classifying low volume road network system using multiple parameters. The Kesbewa DS Division was taken as the study area for this research and first main parameter considered was the shortest distance and adjusted shortest distance. The Map of the selected area is adopted and regenerated in to feature solution of ArcGIS 9.3 and network analysis component of ArcGIS 9.3 is used to obtain the routes of each goal nodes and other nodes by selecting different parameters. The Network Analysis component has been implemented by Digistra Algorithm. The customization capability with programming language like VB 6.0 is used to develop a customized software component to gather all the possible links between each of two goal nodes and other nodes. The proposed software model presents the capability of finding the minimum path of any two nodes for each of factors, and also it is possible to compare two routes for particular two nodes relevant to the factors. The final outcome lists out all list of the nodes with number of link usage at each route.