Using Rough Set Theory to Induce Pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation Strategy

Rough Set Theory (RST) is an induction based decision-making technique, which can extract useful information from attribute-value (decision) table. This study introduces RST into pavement management system (PMS) for maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) strategy induction. An empirical study is conducted by using the pavement distress data collected from 7 county roads by experienced pavement engineers of Taiwan Highway Bureau (THB). For each road section, the severity and coverage of existing distresses and required M&R treatment were separately recorded. The analytical database consisting of 2,348 records (2,000 records for rule induction, and 348 records for rule testing) are established to induce M&R strategies. On the basis of the testing results, total accuracy and total coverage for the induced strategies are as high as 88.7% and 84.2% respectively, which illustrates that RST certainly can reduce distress types and remove redundant records to induce the proper M&R strategies.