Heuristic rules to achieve pavement performance profile objectives

Most highway agencies adopt either a preventive or corrective maintenance strategy for pavement maintenance programming. Preventive maintenance is carried out when the segment distress value is below their respective warning level for defects whereas corrective maintenance is done when the segment distress value exceeds their respective warning level. Since highway agencies operate under a budget constraint, they apply prioritization or heuristic strategies to select the appropriate pavement segments to repair. In the past, very few researchers have been concerned about the year-to-year maintenance demand variation. To date, very few research works have been done to investigate the effect of prioritization or heuristic strategies on year-to-year variation of maintenance demand, cost of repair and network condition. Past research has investigated the year-to-year maintenance demand variation as well as the variation in year-to-year cost of repair but there was no investigation on the overall network pavement condition or the variation in the year-to-year network condition. Furthermore, it is not known which among different conventional prioritization strategies is best for a particular pavement age structure. In this research, firstly, the effect of three types of maintenance strategies, namely ad-hoc corrective maintenance (AdCM), prioritized segment preventive maintenance (PrSPM) and multi-objective optimization in genetic algorithm (GAPM), is examined on a normally distributed pavement age structure to see which one works best for aggregate and year-to-year variation measures. Secondly, different conventional prioritization strategies are tried on four types of pavement age structure (e.g. uniformly distributed, normally distributed, young and old pavement age structure) to see their effect both in terms of aggregate as well as year-to-year performance measures. Finally, the effect of varying the maintenance demand in the active period is investigated.

Author dc:creator

• MOHAMMAD KAMRUZZAMAN

• Pavement maintenance and rehabilitation, Budgets planning, Multi period and multi objective analysis, Genetic algorithms, Optimization models