Browsing by Author "Silva, SA"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

item: Conference-Abstract
Accommodating road accident records in a comprehensive highway management system
(Department of Civil Engineering, 2011-07) Bandara, JMSJ; Silva, SA; Rajapaksha, RPGKS; Pasindu, HR
It has become important to improve planning, design, construction, operation and maintenance standards and manage road system efficiently. There are number of management systems such as pavement management system, road inventory systems, accident data recording system, traffic and passenger demand models, traffic assignment models have been established to handle different stages of road transport. As different organizations are responsible for the above different processes it is imperative to have these systems coordinated to have an integrated highway management system that will share information, expectations and experience. Today road accidents have become a significant negative impact to all road users. To reduce the number of accidents, it is important that manage the accident data in systematic manner because it will provides lot of information. This data is very important to traffic and highway engineers because it helps them to identify the unsafe location of the roads and the reasons for that. This is essential in road improvement projects to carry out safety audits and find the solution to minimize the number of accidents. This paper presents how a road inventory and accident data system could be integrated to share information from one another. In addition the paper highlight how road inventory data and accident data can be used to analyze accidents at road link, road type or administrative area vise and identify accident prone locations or reasons for different types of accidents. The programme was written using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) which is more relevant to customize ArcGIS Desktop Applications to store the data in a Microsoft access database and filter the database using the developed VBA interface. For example, users can find out the number of accidents on a location according to various crash factors contributing to the accident from human side, vehicle side and road environment side. According to filtering combinations, model is developed to show the number of persons died, injured and detail list of accidents. The model has capability to connect road inventory data and accident data with attribute tables in ArcGIS. Therefore, engineers can directly use the GIS tools to represent and analyze the above data in an efficient manner.
item: Article-Abstract
The Curious case of the Khettarama pitch
Nawagamuwa, UP; Senanayake, AIMJ; Silva, SA
During the Compaq Cup tournament in Sri Lanka in September 2009, the teams batting under lights at the R. Premadasa (Khettarama) Stadium pitch consistently found it very difficult to bat and thus lost matches. Many were of the view that the pitch was helping bowlers a lot more during the evening making it very unfair for the team batting second. This paper is based on the study which was carriedout by the authors at the request of Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC)to investigate the behaviour of the.R. Premadasa Stadium (Khettarama) pitch. The study aimed to find out if there was any truth to the above claim by conducting insitu bounce tests and collecting top-dressing samples from the pitch at. regular time intervals. The test was conducted during the hours of a normal day /night One Day International match would be played at this stadium and match conditions were simulated as far as possible. The variation of bounce with time was then compared with the moisture variation through the course of duration of play to see whether there were correlations between the two. Further, a theoretical discussion based on unsaturated soil mechanics and soil science on the effect of these factors is also included for better understanding.
item: Conference-Extended-Abstract
Faster and bouncier cricket pitches using locally available clays
(2009) Nawagamuwa, UP; Senanayake, AIMJ; Silva, SA; Sanjeewa, DMI
Reasons for the lack of 'pace & bounce' in Sri Lankan pitches has been a topic of debate for a long time. In order to address this problem from an engineering perspective, soil samples from Test venue in Colombo were gathered, analyzed and then compared to available data from other countries. Local pitches were found to have high silt content, low clay content and low plasticity due to a difference in clay mineralogy. Small scale model pitches were built and then tested to find the effect of adding commercially available clays on the pitch characteristics.
item: Article-Abstract
Improvement of local soils in order to make "Fast & Bouncy" cricket pitches
Nawagamuwa, UP; Senanayake, AIMJ; Silva, SA; Senanayake, DMI
The playing character of pitches varies considerably from country to country and generally, pitches in the Indian subcontinent are regarded to be 'slow, low & dusty' in contrast to Australian or South African pitches which are 'fast & bouncy'. Sri Lankan players find it particularly hard to adapt to fast and bouncy pitches because they seldom find comparable playing conditions at home. This project tried to address this problem by investigating the possibility of improving the soils used in local cricket pitches in order to make them produce 'fast & bouncy' pitches. Data was gathered from local pitches by collecting and analyzing soil samples from Test venues in thevicinity of Colombo. This data was then compared to available data from other countries, especially Australia (due to similar climatic conditions). It was found that local pitches had high silt content, low clay content and low plasticity due to a difference in clay mineralogy when compared to Australian pitches. It was hypothesized that by reducing the silt content and improving the plasticity by the introduction of Bentonite (a clay type with very high plasticity) in to the soil would produce a faster and bouncier pitch of similar character to those in Australia. Small scale model pitches were built and then tested to find the effect the additional Bentonite on the pitch characteristics.
item: Conference-Abstract
Methodology to find alternative paths using GIS
(Department of Civil Engineering, University of Moratuwa., 2010) Silva, SA; Bandara, JMSJ; Pasindu, HR
In recent years Sri Lanka has experienced a high growth in urban population and the number of private vehicles. Most evident feature of such a trend is urban road congestion; roads in some areas are also facing unexpectedly high traffic flow which causes a lot of time waste in transit and huge losses to the economy of the country. Therefore, it is important to find alternative routes during times of traffic congestion. GIS technology can be used for this purpose, to find alternative paths between two nodes and graphically represent it. This will not only help manage the existing highways efficiently but will also help traffic planning studies. Alternative path between two nodes can be node independent or link independent. Furthermore, the meaning of the node independent path is path which cannot go through specific node or nodes in its best path. The route which is not use a particular link or links of its best path can be defined as link independent path. These paths are important for transport engineers and urban planners in accessibility studies, disaster management and traffic management work. Best path between any two nodes can be found using minimum path algorithms. TransPlan model developed by the Transportation Engineering Division of the University of Moratuwa facilitate finding best paths between any two nodes on the National Road network in Sri Lanka. It is not possible to find alternative paths between two nodes using TransPlan. The objective of this study is to develop a method to find the node independent and link independent alternate paths using Geographic Information System (GIS) and make a model to find the alternative paths of A, B and selected main roads within City of Colombo by customizing the ArcGIS network analysis tool using Visual Basic 6.0. Method used and examples of application are presented in the paper.
item: Thesis-Abstract
Potential of GIS for integrated highway management system
Silva, SA; Bandara, JMSJ
Roads are backbone of transportation system in most countries. It is identified that inefficient road planning and management not only wastes vehicle energy but also valuable time of people. Heavy traffic congestion, environmental pollution and unsafe roads are among the most serious problems caused by inefficient highway management. Hence, roads have become crucial part of economic development of a country at present. In recent years, Sri Lanka also has experienced a very high growth rate in urban population and the number of private vehicles. Most evident feature of such a trend is urban road congestion. Hence, roads in rural areas also facing unexpectedly high traffic flow which causes a lot of time waste in transit and huge losses to the economy of the country. Therefore, the efficient route planning and management has also become one of an important study area because government has identified that build new roads is not the only solution for this problem. Efficient highway management mainly depends on two tasks, which are efficiency of highway data management and reliability of analysis done using that data. Therefore, it is important to have a model (i.e. system, tool) which can be used to perform above tasks. Therefore, in this study, it is attempted that to develop a GIS based model which is called as “Integrated Highway Management System” (IHMS) by customizing the ArcGIS software using Visual Basic (VB 6.0) which helps to engineers and planners to carry out their planning and management an efficient manner. The model is capable of manage road inventory data, manage accident data and emission data, find shortest path and alternative, estimate the emission level of divisional secretariat divisions and estimate the traffic flows of road links using available origin destination data. Moreover, it is carried out detailed literature review about ArcGIS customization to develop the IHMS.