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Highways England seeks vendor to replace Windows 2003-based pavement management systems

Whoever came up with the SWEEP acronym can have a job at El Reg

Updated Highways England, the authority responsible for the nation's roads and related infrastructure, is asking tech vendors to bid for a project worth up to £15m to replace its ageing pavement information management systems.

Still running on an unsupported Windows 2003 system, the Highways Agency Pavement Management System (HAPMS) dates back more than 20 years and is responsible for recording the status of 6,920km of pavement in England.

Highways England, which has an annual budget of around £4.5bn, is now looking for someone to build a new system based on commercial off-the-shelf software. The current system is based upon an outdated version of the Pitney Bowes Confirm product.

It is integrated with the – wait for it – Software for the Whole-life Economic Evaluation of Pavements (SWEEP) solution. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the Highways England IT department chortling over their tea and custard creams about that one. SWEEP too is set to be replaced.

A contract notice [PDF] put the value of the contract up for grabs at £15m for 99 months. That's an implementation period of up to 15 months, followed by an initial term of five years, with the option to extend for two additional periods of one year.

Highways England is hoping the new system will be ready to go live no later than December 2022 so it can switch off and decommission the legacy HAPMS platform by March 2023 at the latest.

The potential value of the contract seems to have crept up since the publication of a prior information notice in June 2020. Back then, it valued the work at £8m for up to seven years (84 months).

Highways England has been asked to explain the apparent increase.

The new system will be expected to hold all pavement asset data including all related underlying model, referencing systems, associated construction data and so on. The authority is looking for automatic quality assurance and the inclusion of "non-prime referential data" such as accident, traffic and defect datasets to support pavement related analysis.

Among other criteria, it is looking for "deterioration modelling" to forecast the future condition of pavements.

In 2018, Highways England awarded Leidos Innovations a £728,000 contract to support HAPMS for two years. ®

Updated at 09:53 UTC on 7 May 2021 to add:

Asked about the contract value increase, Highways England got back to us to say it was down to the "inclusion of more optional services" and its lengthened duration. On the matter of support for the system, it said: "The support and maintenance [for the current product, Confirm] is delivered by Leidos," with hosting managed by Atos, adding: "We are currently working on migrating the data to a cloud services."

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