BIM, GIS, IoT, and AR/VR Integration for Smart Maintenance and Management of Road Networks: a Review

The management and maintenance of road infrastructures demand the use of a tremendous amount of data about their maintenance history and current status. One very characteristic of this information is its geographic nature, which suggests that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are appropriate to facilitate the way we handle it. However, the access to such information nowadays is challenging because of numerous reasons: some data is still mainly stored on paper; databases are out of date; managing scarcely existing records and creating new ones is quite a laborious and time-consuming task; field inspections require human resources and are expensive; and so forth. Thus, we need to make smarter the way management and maintenance of road infrastructures are performed. Some promising technologies appeared in the last few years to overcome a number of the identified issues. This paper presents and discusses on the most prominent work efforts aiming at more intelligent management of the city infrastructures, specially focusing on transport networks. Several of such efforts use Geographic Information Systems, Building Information Modelling (BIM), Internet of Things (IoT), and Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) technologies. Thus, this study emphasizes on the GIS-BIM-IoT and GIS-BIM-VR/AR integrations showing the possibilities and potentials when these technologies work together.