A Road Maintenance Management Tool for Rural Roads in Kenya

Abstract

Road maintenance programs generally are divided into three categories: routine maintenance; periodic maintenance; and the rehabilitation of roads, slab culverts, and bridges. Although the budgets for these maintenance activities are planned prudently, based on the engineer's estimate, changes usually occur in the work plans after the maintenance work starts. The road maintenance activities are broken down into packages, and each package is awarded to the lowest bidding contractor. Progress made on the contract is recorded on a monthly basis, and the reports are generated on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis for each region or for an entire country. To perform these works more efficiently, software known as the Road Maintenance Management System (RMMS) was designed and implemented in 47 regions of the Kenya Rural Road Authority (KeRRA), Africa. The software is capable of tracking the change orders in every activity in the work plan and recording the construction progress in detail. As a main objective, this paper discusses the framework of the RMMS system. This paper also identifies five main road maintenance activities that experienced a high number of change orders for road maintenance projects of Kenya.