Risk-Based Life-Cycle Cost Analysis in Preventive Pavement Management: A Chinese Highway Case

Compared to major structural repair or even replacement, preventive preservation of in-service pavements has been popular than ever in engineering practice, with wide-ranging merits from improving pavement conditions to reducing future budget needs. In recent years, pavement preventive management has become more complex in China as the competition for pavement preservation funds has grown and the need to justify decisions has increased. As a result, Life-Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) has increasingly attracted the attention from transportation agencies to perform a cost-oriented engineering economic analysis comparing feasible alternatives. However, most of the previous studies were conducted deterministically and only focused on a single factor, while pavement management is apparently affected by many potential sources of uncertainty. The risk-based analysis to investigate potential risks and combined effects of multiple factors is a necessary component for transportation agencies' management. This paper aims at presenting a risk-based probabilistic LCCA for an empirical Chinese highway preventive preservation case. Major analysis variables of different range, i.e. discount rates, annual traffic growth rates, and preservation costs are carefully examined in this study in order to probe risks of different scenarios, investigate combined effects of different variables, and identify a preservation strategy with less life-cycle costs.