Incorporating uncertainties into determination of flexible pavement preventive maintenance interval

Abstract

ABSTRACTContinual pavement deterioration creates problems in providing adequate transportation services. Conducting appropriate preventive maintenance (PM) with optimal intervals not only preserves the pavement at a desired performance level, but also provides a cost-effective approach to economizing the maintenance budget. The objective of this paper is to provide a reliability-based framework to determine optimal PM intervals for flexible pavements. The fourth-order method of moments is applied to determine optimal PM intervals based on pavement reliability. The proposed methodology contributes to cases where the distributions for characterizing variable uncertainties are unknown or difficult to identify. The results showed that the proposed method is capable of incorporating uncertainties into the analytical process of obtaining optimal PM cycles through closed-form solutions. The optimal PM interval for the studied newly built pavement is about 7 years. Sensitivity analysis indicates that optimal PM interval increases as PM cost increases, and decreases as rehabilitation cost increases.