ABSTRACT
Short-term maintenance needs will be obvious to pavement engineers, and probably also, to road users. The difficulty sometimes, is in identifying the longer-term maintenance need, to establish a justified Forward Programme with an approved budget.
England’s Strategic Road Network uses condition information held on its PMS (pavement management system) obtained from regular network-wide traffic-speed condition surveys. These surveys provide data which may be used as proxy indicators of future failure. From selected condition parameters, condition thresholds are used from their distribution curves. These are set at meaningful levels, based on many years of experience, which frequently correlate very well with the Remaining Service Life of pavements from the construction and maintenance histories which are also held on the PMS.
This combined information provides powerful evidence for confirming entry level, candidate schemes and the maintenance budgets. It is simply displayed using a web-based ArcGIS, with 100m sections. This allows schemes to be investigated in more detail, to be ether confirmed or held in reserve. Schemes can be accurately identified five, six years or more, ahead of maintenance being required and carried out, at the optimum time.
To help identify and develop rehabilitation schemes, other data is also utilized in the scheme identification cycle such as SCRIM machines which measures skid resistance, visual surveys, history of repairs and Traffic Speed Deflectometer (TSD) surveys.
As scheme specific data becomes available, it is fed into the PMS and displayed on GIS to validate or redefine the originally generated schemes.
