Overcome Common Road Network Data Management Challenges

In today’s rapidly evolving and advancing world, understanding linear referencing system (LRS) fundamentals is crucial for efficient road asset and event data processing, especially for departments of transportation (DOTs). We’ll explore basic LRS concepts, their role in enhancing data security and management, and integration into organizational frameworks. Additionally, we’ll discuss the significance of data lifecycle management (DLM) and its incorporation into business systems.

Linear Referencing Systems

An LRS is a set of procedures that linearly map road inventory data to the route using a linear referencing method (LRM). The LRM plays a critical role for a team to bring and share data together. An LRS is not singularly focused — it supports an entire organization, as well as other local, regional, and state agencies, providing enterprise capabilities:

Planning and programming for funding.
Engineering for alignment.
Designing data via computer-aided design (CAD).
Integrating construction with geographic information systems (GIS).
Operating and maintaining assets.

These activities are tied to the network, and an LRS is essential for managing data and connecting it to benefit all authorized users.

For additional information, including how data is captured and how data can be archived, please read our “Increasing Data Collaboration with Esri Roads and Highways” and “What is Linear Referencing?” blogs.

4 Best Practices to Implement ArcGIS Roads and Highways for Transportation Agencies

Implementing Esri® ArcGIS Roads and Highways — a road network management system — provides an efficient and streamlined LRS foundation, allowing better road network data management, integration with other business systems, and data analysis and visualization.

As an enterprise LRS data management system tying business data together through location, ArcGIS Roads and Highways:

Integrates multiple route and event data sets.
Provides a comprehensive view of data and analyses.
Expands collaboration.
Locates road network assets and characteristics.

4 Best Practices

As a commercial off-the-shelf software, ArcGIS Roads and Highways establishes an integrated system for comprehensive road network data management.

Implementing ArcGIS Roads and Highways together with an ArcGIS enterprise deployment can be a complex undertaking. Through our experience, we’ve identified the top four best practices.

1. Define Your Route

The first decision is how to define a route.

What core components make a route unique for your agency? How is it defined now, e.g., intelligent route identifiers or a street name?
Does the existing numbering or naming approach support current and future needs? Are connected and automated vehicle future needs being considered?
How can other agency route definitions influence route uniqueness (intersection-to-intersection or traditional GIS centerline with multiple breaks)?

2. Measure Your Route

The next decision is how best to measure your routes.

Are calibrated (driven mileage) or geometric (digitized centerline) measures better? The correct answer is based on what is best for your organization. As a GIS-based system, ArcGIS Roads and Highways inherently provides more automated capability and efficiency with a geometric measure, but it can also fully support calibrated measures.
What existing business systems are tied to the measurement process? If you have a legacy system, does it need to be updated?
What happens if a new route measurement is introduced? LRS editors must understand the potential impacts on how the measures are maintained with other integrated systems.

Moving to a geometric measure may require more effort in the short term but provides long-term strategic benefits. If you allow software — such as ArcGIS Roads and Highways — to help manage the measurements, the underlying data spatial grid will inherently carry that measure forward and require less manual maintenance effort. Managing calibrated measures over time will require some manual input but provides less system and process disruption.

3. Differentiate Route and Inventory Data

ArcGIS Roads and Highways is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) package and is highly configurable. It provides flexibility to measure routes and road inventory data, including how to best model and maintain core business data along the route.

What road inventory data items (events) do you maintain along roadways? What attributes should be modeled to help describe them?
What agency assets are adjacent to your road network? What offset values might support business data next to the route?
What data should be maintained inside ArcGIS Roads and Highways? What data is best maintained in its source system of record, and how should that be location-referenced to the enterprise LRS?
What multimodal assets could be included to support micro-mobility requirements, airports, seaports, and spaceports?

4. Harness Time

You should carefully consider how to best evolve existing business practices to leverage data temporality, which can save time and increase analytical capabilities.

How much manual effort would be saved if all event data automatically updates when a route is updated and edited?
What if all route and event data is temporally synchronized and available?
What new analytics could be available (what, where, and when)? What other data-driven analyses and forecasting could be conducted?

7 Lessons Learned

Integrating GIS and LRS capabilities with agency data is a significant step, but it is a model ¾ it's not meant nor designed to be perfect. Implementing an enterprise system and conducting the corresponding data modeling and migration effort requires commitment, providing significant abilities to meet existing and forecasted requirements, resulting in data workflow efficiencies, system integration prospects, and enterprise analytical capabilities.

Here are seven lessons learned from ArcGIS Roads and Highways implementations:

It is a COTS software and is highly configurable. Customize your business processes, not the software.
Don’t just automate legacy processes. Evolve your processes for more efficiency.
Leverage prototyping to interact with data, exercise the tools, review outputs, and test the processes.
Change management is critical to success. Communicate the changes often and concisely.
Implementation can help better reflect reality — but it is a model.
An active user group (Roads and Highways User Group [RHUG]) provides a venue to share ideas, troubleshoot problems, discuss enhancement ideas, and identify bug fixes.
Manage expectations. System implementation takes time, but harnessing enterprise integration opportunities is priceless.

ArcGIS Roads and Highways Within Your Organization

Key Business System Spatial Enablement

ArcGIS Roads and Highways allows better-informed decisions by creating a centralized environment to manage route and event data. This transactional data environment can begin as a data warehouse, or the data can be integrated and exported to other business systems.

Imagine you want to run a data query on multiple items:

Speed limit (traffic engineering line event on LRS).
Pavement conditions (maintenance line event on LRS).
Average daily traffic (traffic line event on LRS).
Fatal crash locations (safety engineering point event).
Completed maintenance activities (maintenance point/line event).
Rumble strips (pavement line event).

With dataset spatial overlays, agencies can identify specific route areas that pose a threat, helping inform decisions to focus on and fund problem-solving. And query refinements can generate maps highlighting potential high-risk areas. Enterprise management systems provide real-time answers. Without this capability, it could take two people up to seven days of collecting data and combining it from different data sources.

Automated LRS Updates

Optimizing an LRS with ArcGIS Roads and Highways improves data accuracy and streamlines organizational processes, including data flow and technical update processes.

Enterprise LRS with event behaviors — incorporating specific event behaviors based on the route type can automate road inventory data revisions.
Key business system integrations — automatically updating data business rules, synchronizing event data, and communicating workflow.
Research and academic documentation — the philosophy and logic of route definition and the relationship of the LRS to event data is founded on research by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the National Cooperative Research Highway Program (NCHRP).

Automation advances spatial data management, integrates enterprise systems, and provides a dynamic and responsive approach.

Improved Business Intelligence (BI), Data Analytics, and Investment Decisions

Traditional BI relies on independent databases, e.g., capital projects, financial and accounting systems, and project plans. Introducing route, measure, and shape values allows for more robust data analytics. For instance, dynamic segmentation can match locations along route geometry to generate shapes, find the matching route, and measure values. This type of data integration allows data sharing with multiple databases, increasing an organization’s ability to realize the power of its most valuable asset — its data.

Harness the Power of Your Data

The benefits of an enterprise LRS extend beyond transportation infrastructure management. Integrating a COTS system like ArcGIS Roads and Highways brings a new level of efficiency and accuracy. System components and automation capabilities streamline business processes, increase cost savings, and provide a high return on investment. An LRS becomes more than a compliance tool for mandated reporting purposes; it becomes the cornerstone of enterprise data management, system integration, data governance, and BI capability with location and time referencing abilities.

For more information, please watch the on-demand INSIGHTS webcast “How Esri ArcGIS Roads and Highways Helps Transportation Agencies Harness the Power of Data.”

About the Authors

A special thank you to Gary Waters, Director of the Transportation Engagement Team at Esri, for his contributions and collaboration on the INSIGHTS webcast and this blog content.

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4 Best Practices for Implementing Esri ArcGIS Roads and Highways