Pavement maintenance and rehabilitation budget allocation considering multiple objectives and multiple stakeholders

ABSTRACT

Highways play an important role in economic and social development at both national and regional levels. As a major component of highway infrastructure, pavements require significant funding to be maintained at an acceptable level of service. Allocating the budget for pavement maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) is a complex decision-making process for a highway agency. This allocation of funding across M&R activities and across districts becomes a challenging process with the presence of multiple stakeholders, constrained budgets, customer satisfaction, agencies' strategic goals, and deteriorating pavement conditions. This paper proposes an extended goal-programming framework for allocating the available pavement M&R budget across multiple management districts of a highway agency over its planning horizon. A case study of applying the proposed model is conducted using data from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), where five objectives are considered: maximise the proportion of pavement sections with best conditions, minimise the proportion of pavement sections with worst conditions, minimise crash severities through pavement M&R, minimise energy consumption due to M&R activities, and maximise the total lane mile of pavement sections receiving M&R treatments. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to examine the effect of different parameter values on the results of budget allocation.

KEYWORDS:

• Pavement M&R
• budget allocation
• multiple objectives
• multiple stakeholders

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).