Integrated prioritization and optimization approach for pavement management

Abstract

This thesis proposes an improved methodology of incorporating priority preferences into pavement maintenance programming to overcome these problems. Instead of applying priority weights directly into the mathematical formulation of maintenance programming, priority preferences are handled in two stages of post-processing of the optimal programming process, namely a tie-breaking analysis and a trade-off analysis. The optimal programming problem is first solved without applying priority weights to any parameters of the problem. This ensures that the optimality of the solution is not disturbed. In the tie-breaking post-processing, prioritized maintenance activities are identified to replace lower priority activities in the solution, without affecting the optimality of the solution. Finally, a trade-off analysis is performed to introduce more prioritized activities into the solution based on the willingness of the highway agency to accept some loss in optimality. The entire framework is clearly illustrated using examples.