ABSTRACT
Efficient maintenance management is of fundamental importance for a highway agency in terms of their fallbacks into the traffic safety and economics of pavement operation, which require to keep the road condition at an acceptable level with limited investments. In this paper, a modelling approach for the pavement deterioration and the maintenance decision process is proposed to achieve the optimal strategy with minimizing the life-cycle costs of the pavement. Firstly, the pavement condition is defined using the cumulative service index Combined Condition Index (CCI), where its deterioration is described by the general Wiener process. Next, the impacts of different interventions, such as chip seal or overlay, are integrated in the deterioration modelling with the Bayesian updating of the deterioration parameters. Then a maintenance problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, utilizing the real-time observations to determine the optimal maintenance policy. Finally, a case study is presented to illustrate the implementation of this approach.
