User's manual for the HDM-III model

This book describes the Highway Design and Maintenance Standards model (HDM-III) and its constituent components and provides a comprehensive discussion of the submodels, their interaction, and the operational parameters involved. The HDM-III is designed to make comparative cost estimates and economic evaluations of different construction and maintenance options, including different time-staging strategies, either for a given road project on a specific alignment or for groups of links on an entire network. The user can search for the alternative with the lowest discounted total cost and can call for rates of return, net present values, or first-year benefits. If the HDM is used in conjunction with the Expenditure Budgeting Model, the set of design and maintenance options that would minimize total discounted transport costs or maximize net present value of an entire highway system under year-to-year budget constraints can be determined. The HDM-III model is not only a readily usable program for handling voluminous computations automatically, it is also a repository of the most extensive and consistent set of empirical data on the subject. The information includes the qualitative structure and quantitative parameters of relationships among construction standards, maintenance, traffic characteristics, road deterioration, and vehicle operating costs.