Environmental and economic evaluations of treatment strategies for pavement network performance-based planning

Abstract

• Problem framing impacts performance-based planning environmentally and economically. • Explored problem framing involves treatment materials, types and evaluation period. • Allocation model makes pavement treatment decisions by multiple condition metrics. • Annual budget for the proposed strategy is 32% smaller than a conventional strategy. • GHG emission for the proposed strategy is 21% smaller than a conventional strategy. Performance-based planning is an important tool for allocating treatment resources across a pavement network from a set of candidate treatments with a budget constraint. Existing research focuses on improving allocation decisions through changes in the optimization algorithm without considering the consequences of how optimization analyses are framed. In this paper, both environmental and economic performance is evaluated for different problem framing in the form of different treatment strategies that consist of treatment materials, treatment types, and evaluation period. Results show that the proposed strategy that uses both concrete and asphalt, different treatment types, and a long evaluation period could reduce GHG emissions and improve pavement network performance based on the Iowa U.S. route network. Compared to a conventional 5-year asphalt-only strategy, proposed strategy can accomplish this with an annual budget that is 32% smaller and reduce associated GHG emissions by 21%. These results contribute to achieving a sustainable pavement network.