Airport Pavement Management Using System Dynamics

Through the past few decades, maintenance management particularly keeping infrastructures in acceptable condition, especially in airport pavement, has become a vital issue among city officials, economic experts and related managers. As opposed to traditional strategy of passive maintenance actions, a cost-effective and optimized approach to manage the airport pavement in terms of serviceability and safe operation is required. For this purpose, effective factors and their inter-related feedback loops over time should be recognized which need a comprehensive and accurate expert knowledge. These sophisticated inter-relationships make the problem much harder, which cannot be conquered using conventional approaches. The main aim of this study is to deploy a well-performed approach, called system dynamics, to effectively and efficiently manage airport pavement. This approach not only illustrates the pavement condition index (PCI) over time, but also shows the required maintenance or rehabilitation actions in each year based on final benefit cost ratios of the applied strategy in a time span of 20 years. Different scenarios based on different initial PCI and different critical acceptable PCI are modeled. The best maintenance plan would be selected based on the benefit cost ratio and minimum required PCI. The results show that in the case of choosing critical PCI lower than the minimum required PCI and applying the related maintenance plan, the PCI would be more than 85 over time along with a higher benefit cost ratio. The presented approach has the flexibility to use a variety of weights for cost factor, PCI rise, maintenance performance time required, and maintenance expected life to score each maintenance action.