Towards a Rule Driven Approach for Updating Dynamic Road Segments

In recent years, the development of the GIS-T (Geographic Information System for Transportation) applications has gained much attention, providing the transportation planners and managers with in-depth knowledge to achieve better decisions. Needless to say, developing a successful GIS for transportation applications is highly dependent on the design of a well-structured data model. Dynamic segmentation (DS) data model is a popular one being used more and more for different GIS-T analyses, serving as a data model that splits linear features into new set of segments wherever its attributes change. In most cases, the sets of segments presenting a particular attribute change frequently. Transportation managers place great importance on having regular update and revision of segmented data to ensure correct and precise decisions are made. However, updating the segmented data manually is a difficult task and a time-consuming process to do, demanding an automatic approach. To alleviate this, the present study describes a rulebased method using topological concept to simply update road segments and replace the manual tasks that users are to carry out. The proposed approach was employed and implemented on real road network data of the City of Tehran provided by the Road Maintenance and Transportation Organization (RMTO) of Iran. The practical results demonstrated that the time, cost, human-type errors, and complexity involved in update tasks are all reduced.