ABSTRACT
On high volume highway networks decision makers need to plan maintenance interventions considering their impact on traffic flow and related user costs. In urban agglomerations this impact is not limited to the highway sections but can propagate into the surrounding lower grade roads. Both classical pavement and bridge management fall short of addressing this problem since they, if at all, consider user costs related to maintenance intervention on a single object e.g. bridge, pavement section, tunnel, etc. However, classical pavement and bridge management provide long-term costs of maintenance interventions, that can be used to find an optimum maintenance corridor, that minimizes the sum of agency and user costs. This paper proposes a maintenance corridor optimization model that uses the results of pavement and bridge management systems. The basis of the model is a graph that models accurately the physical network structure and is augmented to accommodate all feasible object maintenance interventions and related traffic regimes. The optimization comes down to minimum cost problem in the augmented graph subject to costs corridor length constraints. The cost model considers agency costs for intervention and traffic control costs as well as the user costs due to additional travel time, accidents and vehicle operation. In addition, the augmented graph allows intervention scheduling dividing the duration of corridor interventions in four periods. In example the use of the work zone optimization model is provided. The results show consequences of different intervention strategies for objects within a corridor to agency and road user costs.
