Pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation Planning Considering Budget Uncertainty

Abstract

Maintenance and rehabilitation planning plays a pivotal role in the implementation of an efficient pavement management system. The variables are generally considered deterministic to solve the problem. Nevertheless, this problem tackles with a high level of uncertainty. For instance, the budget, as one of the essential criteria, is fluctuated owing to resource limitation, and policy alteration. If the budget is taken into account as deterministic, the result of the problem may be considerably different from the absolute optimal solution to the problem. This investigation aims to solve a maintenance and rehabilitation problem by consideration of a novel and powerful uncertainty approach. To this end, a multi-stage integer linear uncertainty model is introduced to find a solution, which is feasible and optimal in all of the uncertainty modes. The case study of this paper is a network, including six pavements. The outcomes indicated that the proposed model is competent to consider budget fluctuation, and it introduces a solution that is optimal for all uncertainty scenarios. The comparison of deterministic and uncertainty models revealed that the number of preventative maintenance selected by the uncertainty model is more than that of the deterministic model. The number of preventative maintenance was increased from 36.67% to 40.91% via considering uncertainty in the problem. It can be postulated that the uncertainty model tries to allocate budget to more segments to reduce the likely negative impacts of budget fluctuation on the project.