Development of Automated Routing of Overweight/Oversize Vehicles System forHouston District

摘要

The Motor Carrier Division (MCD) of the Texas Department of Transportation(TxDOT) typically issues more than 32,00 permits each month for oversize and/or overweight vehicles. The procedure for attending theses requests is time consuming and costly. It consists of (1) establishing a tentative route with adequate clearances (2) an identification of all the bridges on the route, (3) the retrieval of the files (or drawings) of each bridge, (4) an analysis of each bridge, performed in the Design Division, to evaluate the adequacy of each structure for the vehicle, and (5) if a structure is not adequate, an alternate route is investigated. This project reports the efforts to implement an automatic procedure for the routing of overweight/oversize vehicles for the Houston District. The procedure uses a network representation of the On-system roads which was built using official TxDOT base maps identifying the bridges on the vehicle's route. The bridges on the route are evaluated to determine their adequacy for the incoming vehicle by means of Texas Administrative Code rules and by evaluating formulae developed in Study 0-1443, accessing bridge ratings stored in BRINSAP. Route optimization procedures are included to minimize travel distances avoiding vertical clearance constraints underneath overpass and insufficient bridges. The efforts of this project have focused on implementing an operational system for TxDOT's Houston District.