Highway pavement maintenance optimisation using HDM-4: a case study of Morocco's arterial network

ABSTRACT

One of the key objectives of a pavement management system (PMS) is to find the optimal maintenance strategy, which minimises the sum of a road agency and user costs by maximising the net benefit to society. The PMS helps road agencies to better apply a selection of the right pavement treatments. The objective of the present paper is to show how the HDM-4 (Highway Development and Management 4) approach allows to develop a policy road leading to the optimal and robust selection of maintenance strategies under budgetary constraints, which minimises the sum of agency costs and road user costs in present value or maximises the net benefit to society over an analysis period. The findings could help road agencies to better apply the right pavement treatments. The present study is based on the exploitation of road network data, obtained from pavement structural condition survey and performed by the National Studies and Road Research Center. The study applies a long-term simulation (20 years) of maintenance budget needs under different budget scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Highway development and management 4
• pavement management system
• flexible pavement
• pavement performance models
• international roughness index
• roads maintenance

Acknowledgments

This study was carried out with the cooperation of the Directorate of Development Studies and Road Research (Ex-CNER) using the CNER databases, under the supervision of the Directorate of Roads and Land Transport.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 International Roughness Index (IRI), measures the bumpiness of a road the total anticipated vertical movement a vehicle would experience over a given stretch of road, usually expressed in metres/kilometre; the lower the value, the smoother the ride.