Integrated system to develop highway rehabilitation projects

Highway resurfacing, restoration, rehabilitation, and reconstruction can extend the life of an existing facility. At the same time, enhanced safety can be engineered into a project by making improvements to other features that relate to, for example, bridge improvements, minor widening of lanes and shoulders, and minor alterations to horizontal and vertical alignment, in addition to pavement resurfacing and repair. Recent rehabilitation projects in California that were expanded to include safety enhancements resulted in original project-cost estimates underestimating costs, often by millions of dollars. This paper presents an integrated database-management expert-system computer program (4RSCOPE), which is a design tool to address this problem. The program has been developed to allow Caltrans engineers to gather data from both office records and field assessments, determine the design features to be included, and thus determine the project scope. The program is expected to become the standard system used by district engineers statewide in California to develop rehabilitation projects.