Near-road Environment Sensitivity Analysis for Heavy Vehicle Freight Transportation by BIM and GIS Integration System

Heavy vehicle freight transportation is one of the most important sources of urban air emissions, which has severe impact on near-road environment and surrounding communities. Currently, transportation departments have tried to manage heavy vehicles with policies of road levels and restrictions. Heavy vehicles could only be driven on certain roads or in limited periods, so that their impacts on the near-road environment can be reduced. In addition, they intend to charge for the environment destruction behaviours of heavy vehicles. However, the policies and charges are limited in quantitative and geographically local measurement and evaluation of the road damage and environment threats. They are the key to evaluate the near-road environment sensitivity related to freight transportation. The near-road environment sensitivity varies across the geographical space, and is also related to the loading and basic conditions of heavy vehicles. Therefore, it should be analysed from two aspects: road maintenance and environment carrying capacity. Multiple proxy variables are used for depicting both kinds of impacts of heavy vehicles. For road maintenance, building information modelling (BIM) provides detail information of its proxy variables such as specifications of freight. The proxy variables also include heavy vehicles conditions, their real loadings, and traffic volumes in each road sections from historical data. For environment carrying capacity, the impacts of transportation emissions on local environment can be examined by spatial models with its proxy variables land use conditions, levels of road networks, population density in urban areas, topological relations between roads and nature reserves, etc. Therefore, with the quantitative analysis of the impacts of heavy vehicles on road maintenance and environment carrying capacity, this research can generate near-road environment sensitivity maps to improve the management effectiveness of freight transportation for transportation departments.