PAVER™ provides pavement management capabilities to: (1) develop and organize the pavement inventory; (2) assess the current condition of pavements; (3) develop models to predict future conditions; (4) report on past and future pavement performance; (5) develop scenarios for M&R based on budget or condition requirements; and (6) plan projects.
The following is a brief overview of the PAVER™ components and capabilities.
PAVER™ inventory management is based on a hierarchical structure composed of networks, branches, and sections, with the section being the smallest managed unit. This structure allows users to easily organize their inventory while providing numerous fields and levels for storing pavement data.
These are some of the other features included in Inventory:
The Prediction Modeling function in PAVER™ helps identify and group pavements of similar construction that are subjected to similar traffic, weather, and other factors affecting pavement performance. The pavement condition historical data are used to build a model that can accurately predict the future performance of a group of pavements with similar attributes, Figure 2.
The Condition Analysis feature allows users to view the condition of the entire pavement network or any specified subset of the network. This feature reports past conditions based on prior interpolated values between previous inspections. It reports projected conditions based on prediction models. In PAVER™, conditions can be viewed on GIS maps in addition to tables and graphs, Figure 3.
The PAVER™ Work Planer is a tool for planning, scheduling, budgeting, and analyzing alternative pavement maintenance and repair (M&R) activities.
The PAVER™ work plan provides two ways to analyze budgets scenarios. The first way determines the consequence of a selected budget on pavement condition and the resulting backlog of Major M&R (unfunded). In addition to a single budget scenario, PAVER™ also offers a budget split feature. The budget split feature allows the user to split a budget based on different M&R work types. This can aid a user that has a set budget for Global work and a different set budget for Major work. The second way determines the budget requirements to meet specific management objectives, i.e. backlog elimination or PCI goal. This enables managers to develop a variety of funding scenarios to support their decisions, Figure 4.
The Project Planning tool in PAVER™ is included in the M&R Plan and allows the user to develop projects based on user-specified required work and PAVER&trade recommended work. This tool greately aids the user in planning projects and, upon completion of the projects, automatically update the work history data.
PAVER™ includes internal mapping capabilities to view GIS reports directly in PAVER™. PAVER™ also has the functionality to export GIS reports, such as inventory, inspection, condition analysis, work plan, linear segmentation and SDSFIE reports. These reports can be viewed in commercial GIS software.
PAVER™ offers an improved user interface. New tools have been added to assist users in selecting pavement sections. Internal GIS-based selection has been added along with a “Windows Explorer-like” tree selection tool. A pull-down menu selection tool and a tab selection tool are seen in Figure 5.
The GIS Assignment tool links the PAVER™ data for individual pavement sections to GIS data. The GIS Assignment tool provides an internal “point-and-click” interface to create, remove, or change the link between pavement sections and GIS map features.
Using the same visual layout as Selectors, Figure 5, the tool dramatically reduces the time required to create or change the link between GIS and pavement data. This tool is designed to work directly with the same ESRI shapefiles that are used in PAVER™’s internal GIS capabilities.
These wizards assist the user by providing a step by step process for several common tasks. These wizards are: