Pavement Management Systems (PMS) are widely used by transportation agencies to maintain
safe, durable and economic road networks. There are many PMS software packages that have
been developed over the past decades for provincial/state road agencies. However, sometimes
due to lack of budget and experience, adopting the existing PMS for a road agency is not cost
effective. Thus, it is important to introduce a simple, effective, and affordable PMS for a local
agency and municipality.
This research is carried out in partnership between the City of Markham and the Centre for
Pavement and Transportation Technology (CPATT) located at the University of Waterloo. For
the purpose of developing a PMS for local agencies, an extensive literature review on PMS
components was carried out, with emphasizing data inventory, data collection, and performance
evaluation. In addition, the literature review also concentrated on the overall pavement condition
assessment. In July 2011, a study on “Evaluation of Pavement Distress Measurement Survey”
was conducted as a part of this research and was distributed to cities and municipalities across
Canada. The study focused on the current state-of-the-practice in pavement distress and
condition evaluation methods used by local agencies to compare the results from the literature
review. The components of the proposed PMS framework are also developed based on the
literature review with some modifications and technical requirements. The City of Markham is
selected as a case study, since it represents a local agency and provides all the data, to illustrate
the validation of the proposed PMS framework.