Life-Cycle Cost Optimization of Highway Maintenance and Rehabilitation Strategies Based on Integrated Maintenance Management System

This paper presents an integrated highway maintenance management system (IHMMS) that can provide the highway engineering with a cost-effective decision-making tool for planning and scheduling of pavement maintenance, repair and rehabilitation (MR&R) activities for highway elements at both the project and network level. The developed system applies a Markovian process to predict performance deterioration with the inclusion of treatment improvement resulting from MR&R alternatives and of comprehensive cost elements analysis. The life-cycle cost optimization for maintenance management is performed in pursuit of minimizing the total life-cycle cost and maximizing highway performance under the budget and network condition rating constraints. To handle the combinatorial and NP-hard nature of such large scale problems, an evolutionary-based optimization technique, namely Genetic Algorithm, is then applied on the system to optimize MR&R decisions. Applying the proposed methodology using real-world data obtained from the Jiangsu Department of Transportation verified the applicability of the system and demonstrated its utilities.