Monitoring overloaded vehicles: Improving traffic control centre performance by using management information systems

Abstract

Decision making is an important function of management and to facilitate decision making that is relevant to any organisation, it is imperative that managers have the correct information at the right time. Since the 1990’s, the Transport Systems and Operations research group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) started developing a Management Information System to assist road traffic authorities and vehicle load control centres in decision making. A management information system is a combination of devices, software, data and procedures designed to address the collection and processing of information with the aim of providing management with relevant information for decision making purposes. This paper describes a management information system (MIS) developed and implemented in the Western Cape Province since 2006 and recently in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, to assist road authorities with heavy vehicle load control.