Barrett Byrd Associates

Leading edge technology is helping Cheshire’s highway maintenance contractor to provide information to the county council to build up an accurate register of asset condition and deliver continuous service improvement, reports Mike Walter.

Highway maintenance operatives in Cheshire have begun to play a key role in helping to determine how the county’s future street works programme should be planned. New digital equipment has been issued to maintenance crews to record both asset condition and repairs carried out on site, to help predict when further maintenance will be necessary.

Sophisticated pieces of kit such as digital pens and hand held data capture devices have been issued to maintenance crews who work on the Cheshire Highways project, a partnership between contractor Nuttall and Cheshire County Council. Details of work carried out such as repairs to road surfacing or street lighting columns are transmitted from the equipment to a central database used to compile a comprehensive register of the condition of the county’s highway assets.

Cheshire Highways project manager Steve Addison says the decision to issue new technology to operatives who carry out routine maintenance and emergency repairs is providing a reliable and swift means of collecting valuable asset condition data. “Integrating an element of asset management into our term maintenance commitment is helping Cheshire to plan for future works more effectively. Monitoring the condition of assets is carried out as part of our every day works.

“We have over 4,800km of roads and 80,000 street lighting columns to maintain and around 155,000 gullies to empty across the county. Gathering accurate and up to date information is crucial in helping us to plan ahead and provide a good service,” he says.

The digital pen works just as you would expect a conventional pen to, except that an electronic version of the report form is transmitted by GPRS technology to Cheshire Highways’ control centre, which is administered by Nuttall. Electronic transfer of maintenance records in real time allows for asset condition from around the county to be updated on the central database almost immediately.

The team at Cheshire employs a piece of digital road network software known as ArcView GIS which displays highway asset condition and traffic flow data. By considering how busy a road can be, operations can then determine the most suitable time in which to deploy a maintenance crew.

Use of the digital pen by operatives on site ensures that the information completed on a maintenance report sheet is of a consistently high standard. Operatives are unable to sign off a maintenance report until all sections of the form have been completed in a logical and sequential manner. A photograph must also be taken with a mobile telephone and attached as a digital file to verify that repair to a highway asset has been carried out and to a good standard.

Office based administration staff can monitor an operative’s use of the digital pen right away and are able to contact a site crew to verify any query before they have moved on to another job.

Cheshire County Council’s chief engineer Kevin Carrol says the use of the digital pens saves time processing data and helps to reduce clerical errors. “Data gathered from site is now of a consistently high standard. Administration staff no longer receive paper forms and do not have to enter details into the computer system themselves. This not only makes the process of recording assets more efficient but there is no double handling of forms, which can lead to errors.”

Information entered on to an operative’s maintenance sheet regarding surface condition works, for instance, can allow control centre staff to predict when that stretch of carriageway is likely to need further treatment. Information gathered about the number and type of defects, combined with the dates when they occur are helping to give an indication as to when further maintenance will be due.

Kevin Carrol adds that use of vehicle tracking devices on the partnership’s maintenance crews fleet can help to provide an illustration on screen as to where pothole repairs have taken place and indicate if a section of road to have received minor repairs many times should require resurfacing. Use of GIS technology to plot vehicle movements and time spent on site provides a more scientific approach to analysing street work trends, he adds.

A further benefit of using such tracking devices is the ability to deploy the most appropriate vehicle in a fleet in response to an emergency, such as a bridge strike or a flood. Once there, a photograph can be taken of the incident by a maintenance operative and transmitted to the operations centre to provide control staff with evidence of the nature of the incident.

Kevin Carrol adds that around 150,000 separate highway maintenance jobs are completed in the county each year. He says that the sheer volume of work means that a paper based system of recording both what has been done and the condition of assets has become unfeasible and the use of electronic based systems is becoming essential.

Maintenance staff with responsibility for street lighting columns use new hand held data capture devices to gather asset information. Details entered on site regarding the type of lantern and the date of installation in a particular column can, for instance, help Cheshire Highways to anticipate when that lantern is likely to need replacing again. Carrying out replacement of lanterns before they have ceased to function can help to boost the contractor’s performance in relation to a series of key performance indicator targets set out in the term maintenance agreement.

“Our street lighting KPIs have improved thanks to the use of the new technology, which allow us to monitor our performance,” says Steve Addison. “We introduced a series of targets at the start of the contract with regard to the time taken to respond to emergencies and have gradually improved on those.”

Knowing precisely the asset type of thousands of street lights has also helped Cheshire to tender for reduced energy prices from a range of electricity suppliers. Armed with a firm rather than an estimated energy requirements led Cheshire to negotiate a reduction in annual consumption and a saving for street lighting in the last year. “Better quality information leads to a more competitive price,” says Kevin Carrol.

Drivers operating gully emptying plant have their own digital equipment to either record that work has successfully been carried out or to register a defective gully. Their vehicles are fitted with electronic tracking devices to help Cheshire Highways to plot the routes taken by a vehicle and plan return visits more efficiently. The vehicles can be tracked in real time via a web based facility.

Use of new technology to record the condition of assets on the highway does not stop at rigid structures. The team from Cheshire Highways has begun to use digital pens and data logging devices to build up a comprehensive inventory and database of trees alongside roads and on council land.

Accurate knowledge of the age, species and condition of trees should help to determine when their condition is likely to deteriorate in order to prevent a sudden fall. “Different trees perform in different ways and we have to watch out for varieties such as poplar, which tend to split easily and grow very fast,” says operations manager Steve Gee. “We assess how close a tree is to a road or a school playground to determine risk and look to cut down ageing branches before they fall.”

Cheshire Highways

Contractor Nuttall was appointed to carry out highway and vehicle maintenance for Cheshire County Council for a period of seven years in October 2004. The contract is worth in the region of £27M a year and has a potential for a three year extension.

Works covered by the contract include maintaining carriageway, bridges and street lighting, verge maintenance, drainage and winter maintenance. Nuttall also looks after the county’s 500 strong fleet of vehicles, including school buses, community vehicles and gritting trucks.

Since the contract began, Nuttall has invested over £4M in new technology, specialist plant and a fleet of purpose built vehicles.

Digital Pen

Featuring a tiny camera, force sensor and Bluetooth transceiver, James Bond would certainly be interested in getting his hands on one of the digital pens used by operatives on the Cheshire Highways contract.

Up to 70 pictures are taken by the camera every second to record each movement of the pen as it flows across specially printed paper featuring a grid of feint dots. The position of pen strokes in relation to the dot pattern creates a digital image, that is sent via a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone to a computer which communicates with the Cheshire Highways control centre via satellite.

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