8. Formalized Knowledge Representation to Support Integrated Planning of Highway Projects

The objective of this paper is to propose an ontology capable of supporting a structured coordination of spatial-temporal conflicts in highway projects plans. For many highway agencies, there are different functional groups in charge of capital projects planning, safety, design and construction, maintenance and rehabilitation, and short-term operational tasks. However, many of these functional groups tend to have a “siloed” approach to planning. Integrated planning is therefore challenged by the existence of multiple incompatible legacy systems and the lack of a standardized knowledge representation format for planned highway projects information. Current literature and existing formal representations fail to address the level of information coverage and depth to support the integrated planning of highway projects. Accordingly, this study proposes an ontology-enabled knowledge representation which allows relevant planned projects information and inter-project conflicts to be processed in a standard computer interpretable manner. Ontology development was done through the analysis of project attributes of more than 30 highway agencies, review of existing ontologies, and interviews with team leads of different functional groups of highway agencies. The proposed representation was validated via logical consistency checks and competency questions evaluations in the Protégé environment. Future work will aim to employ this ontology to capture and implement tacit integrated projects planning knowledge for improved decision support.