Superload Project
"Superload is a vehicle-route analysis system designed to streamline the oversize/overweight vehicle permitting process," an innovative application of the advancements in the modern computer technology. Ohio was the first state who embarked on this idea and hired a consulting firm (C.W. Beilfuss & Associates) to develop the Superload system. Several other states (like Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana) adapted the idea and started their own Superload projects. At the time of writing this introduction, states of West Virginia and Iowa have either completed or close to completion of their Superload Projects. Ohio Superload system has the capability of checking under and over height and width limitations as well as load analysis of all the bridges on the route of the vehicle that have been analyzed on BARS on the fly. The Ohio Superload can analyze, Interstate, US and State routes only. At this moment there in NO information fed in the system about local routes or city streets.
The system has a nice user friendly interface and takes only minutes to complete the processing of a typical route. It is a link-node based system. It picks the right bridges on or under from the parallel left and right bridges. Thanks to an intelligent technique developed by the consultant, the system is able to correctly identify the bridges traveled on or under while maneuvering an interchange once the interchange is manually defined in the system. Structure Rating Group (SRG) is working with the consultant to clean up the interchanges on state routes to make the system fully functional. The consultant has finished the work on 359 Interstate interchanges (interchanges where interstate routes cross, Interstate, US or State routes) and those have been reviewed and corrected. We are planning to finish the work on the rest of the interchanges in the next phase of the project.