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Background: This paper reports on a case study of the use of visualization of geospatial data that is distributed across data sets and requires integration over time and space to aid decision makers. Like many State Highway Agencies (SHAs) in the United States, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is organized along the traditional functional lines of planning, design, construction, maintenance, and operations. It has historically relied on experience and longevity of its staff to efficiently and effectively plan its construction and maintenance projects. Although functional boundaries of maintenance and construction are fairly clearly defined, there tends to be some overlap in projects that can be executed by either of the functional groups. The department currently does not have a robust integrated information system for identifying potential planning conflicts between its construction and maintenance projects. This has led to suboptimal use of resources, including overlapping plans for maintenance and mobility enhancement projects.

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This paper presents recent developments and applications of three- (3-D) and four-dimensional (4-D) modeling on two transportation projects and their added value for constructability reviews. Transportation projects are characterized by challenges, such as design complexity, right-of-way acquisition, utility relocation, and traffic management, which truly need to be addressed by constructability reviews so as to make projects successful by minimizing delays, cost overruns, change orders, and so on. The 3-D and 4-D computer-aided drafting (CAD) models are new emerging tools that can tremendously aid constructability reviews. Although the models are extensively used in building projects for this purpose, their use in transportation projects is limited. The 3-D and 4-D CAD models in building projects could also be applied to transportation projects. The 3-D and 4-D CAD model applications developed for the two transportation projects in this paper emphasize the value added by this new technology to communication, technical design checking, construction planning, and work area management applied to transportation projects.