Development of an android application to compute priority score for road sections

Abstract

The quality of roads dictates the development of the country as well as the quality of lives of its citizens. To maintain the road sections at the desired level of service, adequate and timely maintenance works are necessary. But maintaining all the road sections every year is not possible for developing countries like India. These works get constrained by limited budget and hence utilization of the budget becomes crucial for the concerned government department. Out of hundreds of road sections, the department can select only a few at a time. But most of the times, the procedure of filtering out these few sections is not scientific and hence gets influenced by some undue external factors. Looking at these problems, the authors perceived an urgent need of an accessible and user-friendly mobile application that does the prioritization process. The works in this paper describes the development of an android based application which considers the four important domains of any road section viz. pavement functional distress, roughness, social importance and pavement structural strength. From the user inputs related to these four domains, the application accordingly computes and displays a priority score, on the basis of which the user can select the road sections for maintenance works. The validation of the application results has been performed and some test results will be added in the full-length paper.