MoreIntergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solutions announced Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) has placed its new geospatially enabled Safety Management System (SMS), based on Intergraph's transportation solutions, into full operation. The system provides new geospatial analysis capabilities to NDOT's Safety Engineering Section so it can geographically display information about roadway areas with high incidents of vehicle accidents and better probe underlying causes of accidents.
In operation since the 1970s, the previous SMS led to the elimination of many dangerous road hazards in Nevada, but it required specially trained engineers to extract accident data from the database. Now, using the geographic information system (GIS) front end of the new system, anyone in the NDOT can access and analyze data. An additional advantage of the new system is its ability to graphically represent incidents within a single intersection, which might otherwise appear as two different locations because of road naming conventions.
NDOT used Intergraph's GeoMedia Professional and GeoMedia Transportation Manager to build a transportation GIS that merges accident data with a roadway base map and relates the two. GeoMedia Transportation Manager compiled partial datasets from several state and local offices into a single, consistent base map in a new Oracle database, converting the data regardless of its native format. GeoMedia Transportation Manager also stores and retrieves all of the different linear referencing methods used by the police to locate crash sites, including intersection offsets, milepost offsets and address matching. Dynamic segmentation capabilities that correctly maintain the relationships between the road and their crash attributes are also incorporated with the new system. With the new SMS, NDOT staff can perform additional applications, such as:
- Corridor analysis to examine accidents occurring within given proximities of intersections
- Mid-block analysis to track accidents occurring away from intersections
- Dataset merges to help more easily identify relationships between crashes and other factors such as pavement conditions
- Future functionality to be incorporated in the system includes Global Position System (GPS) input of crash locations and department intranet access.
Source: Intergraph, April 4, 2005
