HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE COST CONTROL --PROCEEDINGS OF THE FOURTH CONFERENCE ON ASPHALT PAVEMENTS FOR SOUTHERN AFRICA, HELD CAPE SUN HOTEL, CAPE TOWN, REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA, 12-16 MARCH 1984. VOL 1 & VOL 2.

At a time when cost effectiveness is everyone's priority, it is essential that accurate data are available for construction, operating and maintenance costs of a highway. Construction cost data are readily available unlike the latter two aspects. This paper presents the development of a recording and cost accounting system to provide the required maintenance costs. Roadmap, an acronym for road maintenance analysis package is a suite of programs written for a simple microcomputer to assist the highway maintenance engineer in effectively controlling his funds. The principle function of the system is the generation of a costs table cross referenced to location, maintenance activity, and time period. The engineer has many options of cost breakdown, authority codes, time periods and location segments. Each individual record is stored such that it can be edited at any time. The roadmap program has been developed from systems mounted on mainframe computers used by Australian road authorities to take account of the advantages of micro technology. Such advantages allow small authorities or regional offices access to sophisticated data storage and analysis, easy user operation and no special maintenance or environmental pre-requisites. Furthermore great flexibility has been incorporated into the system. Not only does the system provide statistical data for overall highway feasibility analysis but it allows at local and/or national level -data for setting the appropriate quality and quantity of work -identification of deficient highway features -expenditure control within a more detailed annual budget programme -preparation of future programmes. The low cost microcomputer provides greater scope for recording how much has been spent, where, when and on what. Such data are unavailable from existing fiscal accounting systems.(a) for the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 815702.