TXDOT Pavement Management System Goes Live

In the early 1970’s, TxDOT (Texas Department of Transportation) became one of the first states to implement a Pavement Management System (PMS). At that time, it was state-of-the-art in managing pavements. The system was dubbed Pavement Management Information System (PMIS).

The plan was to provide administrators and district engineers with the information they needed to make good pavement decisions on design, construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation. The system software received minor updates over the next 30 years but was seriously deficient by 2000. In 2012, a giant step forward was made when Mr. Magdy Mikhail, the TxDOT Director of Pavement Preservation, initiated a search for modern off-the-shelf PMS software. An intensive search, including a review by outside consultant, Boston Consultants, led TxDOT to select AgileAssets® Pavement Analyst™ as their new PMS software.

The first Pilot went live on February 29, 2016, and included the following core system functionality:

1. Importing and Managing Visual Condition Data
2. Importing and Managing Ride Data
3. Performance Score Calculations
4. Reports
5. Maps

Work continued to progress rapidly and on May 9, 2016, the full system went live and added the remainder of the system functionality:

1. Performance Models and Optimization Analysis
2. Annual Work Plans
3. Interfaces to other TxDOT Systems
   • COMPASS MMS (Maintenance Costs and Four Year Plan)
   • DCIS (Construction Four Year Plan)
   • TxPROS (Heavy Loads Permitting System)
   • CRIS (Crash Records Information)
   • Construction History
   • Network Condition Data (Visual and Ride) interface is being finalized.

This full pavement management system includes the extensive availability of catalogs of Jasper reports and Map reports to replace those older maps used by the client in their legacy PMIS system. This enables a smoother transition from PMIS to the new Pavement Analyst by the end users who mainly use the current system for mapping and reporting on network condition and work plans.

The second major improvement is the optimization analysis implemented using TxDOT performance models and decision trees which allow TxDOT to replace the current ranking system that the Center for Transportation Research has been doing on an annual basis. The new system will run true optimization under multiple constraints with multiple objectives. The TxDOT districts will now be able to easily run multiple scenarios for their proposed annual plan to iteratively develop the best possible statewide annual work plan.