2015 - Brazil - Automatic Horizontal Road Design Information Extraction from Georeferenced Polygonals: A Brazilian Federal Highway Network Study

Road geometric design data are a vital input for diverse transportation studies. This information is usually obtained from the road design project. However, these are not always available and the as-built course of the road may diverge considerably from its projected one, rendering subsequent studies inaccurate or impossible. Moreover, the systematic acquisition of this data for the entire road network of a country or even a state represents a very challenging and laborious task. This study’s goal was the extraction of geometric design data for the paved segments of the Brazilian federal highway network, containing more than 47,000 km of highways. It presents the details of the method’s adoption process, the particularities of its application to the dataset and the obtained geometric design information. Additionally, it provides a first overview of the Brazilian federal highway network composition (curves and tangents) and geometry.