Alberta Transportation is responsible for managing the construction, maintenance and operation activities on approximately 25,000 kilometres of paved highways. On an annual basis over 3 million tonnes of Asphalt Concrete Pavement (ACP) and 4 million tonnes of Granular Base Course (GBC) aggregates are weighed and hauled for highway construction and rehabilitation activities. The construction process is 100% out-sourced with engineering consultants undertaking the design and contract administration duties while the construction activities are awarded to contractors based upon low bid tender. The present measurement/payment process involves the loading and weighing of gravel trucks at the aggregate pit or asphalt plant by the contractor; manual recording of the haul loads by the consultant’s scale person and manual recording by the consultant’s road checker upon delivery of the load. The scale sheet is collected by the project manager on a daily basis, totaled and verified against the road checker’s book. The same haul data is taken by the contractor and resorted in order to provide payment to the individual truckers. In many cases the consultant and contractor each enters the same data into separate spreadsheet programs. While the present process works adequately there are obvious opportunities for improvement in regards to eliminating contractor/consultant redundancies and with the speed of data collection and reporting. This paper describes how modern information and communication technologies were used to develop the Automated Truck Haul (ATH) system and the results obtained from a highway paving project where the system was piloted. The ATH system consists of a scale-mounted computer that is used to electronically capture the ACP load data and transmit that data via satellite to a centrally located server. The same data is also transmitted to a GPS equipped PDA computer at the paving site where the road checker automatically captures the time and location of unloading. The unload data is then transmitted to the central server in “near realtime” conditions. Through an internet connection the data is accessible to the project consultant, contractor and the department’s regional staff. Results from the ATH pilot project confirm that cost savings are achievable, mainly through the elimination of the consultant’s scale person. Other cost savings and efficiencies were also identified in that the time spend on manual data entry and report generation was greatly reduced.
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