How West Virginia is Leveraging AASHTOWare PermitRoute and AASHTOWare Bridge Rating

March 17, 2026

In May 2024, AASHTOWare and ProMiles established a Strategic Alliance to offer AASHTO members access to an integrated oversize/overweight permitting and routing system, now branded as AASHTOWare PermitRoute. A key advantage of this system is its ability to integrate with AASHTOWare Bridge Rating for existing AASHTOWare users.

We wanted to get a member perspective on how this alliance is helping state agencies, so we asked Dr. Robert Tennant, P.E., WV State Bridge Evaluation Engineer, West Virginia Division of Highways (WVDOH), AASHTOWare Bridge Design and Rating Task Force member, to give us insight into how it has benefited his agency. Here is what he told us:

What problem were you trying to solve by integrating with AASHTOWare PermitRoute?

The WVDOH is trying to synchronize its bridge evaluation software with its oversize and overweight permitting software. We adopted AASHTOWare Bridge Rating as the standard evaluation tool in 2018 and experienced issues correlating bridge safe load capacity to our current permitting software. This along with the interest in automating more of our overweight permits to ease the burden on our permitting and evaluation staff, led us to license AASHTOWare PermitRoute as well.

What is the implementation process like?

Currently in this phase of implementation, we are finalizing the process through extensive testing of the software. By integrating AASHTOWare PermitRoute and Bridge Rating, we have learned about our own bridge inventory and are making updates to it to synchronize routing across the state. We hope to implement AASHTOWare PermitRoute by the beginning of summer. The team at ProMiles has been a joy to work with throughout the implementation process as we solved permitting and evaluation problems every week. We currently have several meetings scheduled weekly to address different goals ranging from overall system development to GIS routing to system configurations where the minute details are discussed on what a permit looks like. The ProMiles team is exceptionally responsive and clearly quite knowledgeable in their field. The benefit of both AASHTOWare Bridge Design and Rating and PermitRoute being AASHTOWare products and developed by ProMiles is immense. There is an excellent working relationship between ProMiles, the permitting and bridges sections, and the West Virginia Division of Highways employees.

How has this integration improved day-to-day tasks for your team?

Our current process consists of building and reviewing AASHTOWare Bridge Rating models to determine safe load capacity and updating a model in our previous evaluation software for use in our current permitting software. This essentially equates to twice the amount of work. By switching to AASHTOWare PermitRoute, we no longer have to maintain the models in our previous evaluation software because AASHTOWare PermitRoute will be able to directly use AASHTOWare Bridge Rating. Additionally, younger staff who have not used the previous software are not as comfortable with the accuracy of the older models. As the younger staff are constantly in AASHTOWare Bridge Rating, they have more confidence in the accuracy of those models for use in AASHTOWare PermitRoute.

How many team members do you have impacted by this integration?

Currently the WVDOH is utilizing eight full-time employees and seven part-time student workers during development and testing. Once AASHTOWare PermitRoute is fully launched, it is estimated that 42 employees will be impacted in the evaluation and permitting sections across the state.