Digital “Golden Thread” Weaves New Era in Roadway Maintenance

Managing and maintaining roadways across hundreds of miles is a challenge for any transportation agency, requiring multiple site visits, testing, mostly paper-based historical documentation, considerable experience and long memories.

National Highways, the highway transportation agency responsible for England’s Strategic Road Network (motorways and major A roads), set out to modernise these conventional practices over a 20-year program to replace end-of-design life and design-load pavement. They also established a Centre of Excellence to help identify, test and deploy new technologies, tools and processes to streamline road management, emphasizing a single source of truth.

“We sought a digital representation—a living digital twin—of our concrete roads from which we can simulate asset behavior with an emphasis on safety, community and environmental outcomes,”

“The idea is to leverage real-world and real-time data to drive preemptive interventions, resulting in improved asset resilience, increased asset life and a safer smoother running network.”

Michael Ambrose, technical lead for the program, explained.

It’s an end-to-end solution that begins with as-built data collection, continues through analysis and work package release to contractors and concludes with field work data capture and upload back into the digital twin for future analysis.

Now three years into the program, and with three comprehensive mobile surveys, that vision has become reality—and it’s impressive. The capabilities and continued advancements are upending conventional practices, making way for more effective, efficient and unexpected maintenance opportunities that simply aren’t possible using more traditional methods.

Read the full story to learn how the program worked and what’s next: