Modeling Information for Maintenance and Safety along the Lifecycle of Road Tunnels

Abstract

Formal safety evaluation along the lifecycle of a road tunnel is a challenging task for road authorities all around the world. The practice is characterized by fragmented configurations of proprietary information systems that, jointly, lack of a shared structure to represent the road tunnel. This makes it difficult to retrieve the required information needed to conduct legally prescribed evaluations. This paper proposes an information model to support safety professionals that is based upon fieldwork in two business subdomains: maintenance governance and road-user safety evaluation. The core of the tunnel information model is based upon the standardized architecture of road tunnels and concepts from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) literature. The authors explain the design in detail and argue that this representation will allow for better integration over the lifecycle. Findings of a validation meeting show that the explicit representation of road tunnel information is sufficiently broad and deep to meaningfully support safety evaluation. Specifically, it allows reasoning about the functional impact of technical failures and the suitability of maintenance concepts proposed. The paper concludes with a discussion of directions for extension of the information model, as experts indicated both inclusion of categories of law-prescribed inspections and road tunnel closure-related categories to provide added value.