Data Management at the National Airport Pavement Test Facility (NAPTF)

The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) National Airport Pavement Test Facility (NAPTF) began operation at the William J. Hughes Technical Center in April 1999. The quantity of data produced by this facility is estimated at 25 gigabytes per year. An important aspect of data management for the project was the implementation of a relational database system to receive the processed data. The Microsoftä SQL Serverä 7.0 database not only facilitates quick retrieval of specific data sets, but also provides worldwide access to NAPTF data via the World Wide Web (WWW). In the current NAPTF configuration of nine test pavements, data is acquired, processed, stored, and disseminated from over one thousand individual sensors using three data collection systems interconnected by wire and wireless local area networks (LANs). A description is given of the data flow from the acquisition, processing, population, and dissemination of the NAPTF database.

Authors: Charles A. Teubert, David R. Brill, Qingge Jia