Management of Urban Road Infrastructure Projects - Decision Support Concept to Maintenance Planning

Abstract

Focus of this research is in improvement of decision making processes during planning phase of road infrastructure maintenance projects within urban environment. This decision making processes belong to complex and ill-defined problems because of several reasons such as a lots of stakeholders, multi-disciplinarity, huge quantity of information, limited resources, conflicting goals and criteria. In order to cope with such complexity this research proposes a decision support concept to help project managers (decision makers/maintenance planners). Concept is based on multicriteria methods and Artificial Neural Net- works (ANN). Because of huge quantity of data to be processed and because of spatial character of urban road infrastructure GIS (Geographic Information Sys-tem) application is introduced as data base management system. The main out-come of a proposed concept is priority ranking of urban road infrastructure elements (within study area) according to importance and necessity to undertake maintenance activities on them. Priority ranking list stands as a good base for decision making within planning processes related to management of maintenance projects. The methodology is tested on road infrastructure of town of Trogir, Croatia.