A Framework of Life-Cycle Infrastructure Digitalization for Highway Asset Management

With increased highway mileage, various types and quantities of infrastructure are equipped on the roadside to improve traffic safety and efficiency but also encounter difficulty in asset management. The collected data are separately stored with diverse formats, granularity and quality, causing repeated acquisitions and islands of information coherence. The life-cycle interoperability of infrastructure data are required to support life-cycle application scenarios in sustainable development. This paper analyzes 459 papers and 538 survey questionnaires to obtain the literature and practical digital requirements, including unified classification and standardized formats, linkage from separated data sources, support for data analysis across different scenarios, etc. To satisfy these requirements, an infrastructure digitalization framework is proposed, including road infrastructure and other data, data governance, life-cycle data integration, application scenarios, regulations and standards, and performance assessment. The application scenarios involve four categories—design and construction, maintenance, operation, and highway administration—each of which contains four or five scenarios. Then, the data integration approach is first developed with master data identification and determination of data elements for data interoperation between different application scenarios, using a modified data–process matrix, correlation matrix, and evaluation factors. A data relationship model is adopted to present static and dynamic correlations from the multi-source data. Numerical experiments are implemented with two practical highway administration and maintenance systems to demonstrate the effectiveness of the data integration approach. Master data identification and data element determination are applied to guide life-cycle data interoperation.