Automating Utility Permitting within Highway Right-of-Way via a Generic UML/OCL Model and Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Each year, thousands of new utilities are installed within the highway right-of-way (ROW) nationwide. This proliferation of utilities yields a great challenge to the traditional practice at road agencies to review, process, and track utility permit requests, document and manage utility conflicts, and check the regulatory compliance of newly installed utilities. This paper presents a new utility permitting system for road agencies, which is based on an object-oriented utility data model in Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its associated constraints in Object Constraint Language (OCL). The UML model defines the required information during the utility permitting process. The OCL constraints capture the regulatory requirements (mostly spatial constraints) that govern the installation of utilities within the ROW. A natural language processing (NLP) algorithm is designed to translate the requirements in textual documents into OCL expressions. The NLP algorithm achieves an average precision of 90% and a recall of 78%. The UML/OCL model is implemented in a spatial database to demonstrate its practical use in supporting automated utility permitting within the ROW. The novelty of this study includes (1) the capacity to model and store utility conflicts, including utility regulatory noncompliance, and (2) the incorporation of utility regulatory requirements as structured data for the automation of utility compliance checking. The newly developed system expedites the permitting process and contributes to the effective management of utilities within the ROW.