| The mission of transportation is to transport people and goods safely and efficiently. Therefore, traffic safety has been one of the most important topics since the birth of the subject of transportation. Improving highway design consistency is considered as an important strategy for improving traffic safety. Geographic information systems (GIS) has been popular for decades due to its great ability to deal with spatial or spatially-related data. Contributions from GIS to transportation have become well known in some aspects. However, GIS, especially its 3D visualization function, has not, in previous studies, been integrated into the core of the highway design consistency evaluation procedure. In contrast, the major objective of this thesis research is to integrate the latest advanced GIS techniques including its 3D visualization function and the state-of-the-art knowledge from previous studies into the highway design consistency evaluation procedure. By adding new functions specifically developed for highway design consistency evaluation, a 3D GIS-based highway design consistency evaluation methodology is developed. This newly developed methodology and associated software tools, as a combination of GIS, including its 3D visualization function, and highway consistency modules, will make significant contributions in the following aspects: highly automated consistency evaluation procedure, 3D-alignment-based consistency level analysis, impressive evaluation result presentation, and spatially based consistency improvement suggestion. Verification of this methodology on a typical 3D-highway segment in Ontario shows very promising results. This study, to a great extent, is convincing that, in the near future, designers could be able to design highways in a regular GIS environment. |
