Methodology for Incorporating Green Assets in Pavement Management: A Case Study Example

Green road asset is a term used to describe road assets that are environmentally responsible and sustainable. As an example, pervious concrete pavement can meet this requirement with its many sustainable benefits such as its ability to allow water to flow through itself to ground that leads to several environmental, ecological, and safety benefits. The pervious concrete pavement technology has been widely acknowledged from the prospective of environmental aspects. However until recently, little attention has been paid to decision making processes in optimizing where the pervious concrete pavement can be effectively used seeing it is a new technology as it needs to be located in an area where risk is minimized. This paper presents a methodology for incorporation in a pavement management system which aims at integrating project-level and network-level decision to optimize the cost at both levels and minimize risk associated with a new material. The proposed model incorporates several flexible and practical features such as variable annual budget limit, annual condition level constraints, and overall condition level of each pavement section along a planning horizon. The powerful Genetic Algorithm method is applied to consider both project-level and network-level variables into life cycle cost optimization and incorporate functional classes such as parking lots, walkways, low volume roads, etc. Also, a Markov model is used to demonstrate pavement deterioration model (Markovian transitional probability) with simulation runs, to simultaneously optimize the life cycle cost problem. The capability of the proposed model is represented along with an illustrative example application.