A risk-based optimisation for pavement preventative maintenance with probabilistic LCCA: a Chinese case

Abstract

Compared to major structural repair or even replacement, preventative preservation of in-service pavements has been more popular in engineering practices, but recently, pavement preventative maintenance (PPM) has become more complex in China as the competition for pavement preservation funds has grown and the need to justify decisions has increased. Therefore, the life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) has increasingly attracted attention from transportation agencies. However, most of previous studies were conducted deterministically or only focused on a single factor, while PPM is apparently affected by many potential sources of uncertainty. The risk-based analysis to investigate potential risks and combined effects of multiple factors is a necessary component of PPM. This paper aims at presenting a risk-based PPM with the probabilistic LCCA for a Chinese highway case. Major analysis variables of different range are examined to probe risks of different scenarios, investigate combined effects of multiple variables and identify an optimal preservation strategy.

Keywords:

• pavement preventative maintenance
• life cycle cost analysis
• risk-based analysis
• probabilistic
• optimisation
• net present values

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all those involved in support and advice on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected]

^2. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Natural Science Foundation of China [project no. 51278057] and Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province, P.R. China [project no. 2012JQ5013].