Pavement Management with a Decentralized Organizational Structure

Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) currently preserves its statewide pavement network through the nine districts that spread around the state, with support from the central offices providing technical guidance and policy development that ensure consistency among the activities in the districts. With continuing efforts over the past decade, many key aspects of the state pavement management program, such as data collection and use, performance measures and forecasting, decision making and optimization, have achieved significant improvement. This paper presents Virginia’s statewide pavement management practices with the discussions being twofold: an overview of the ongoing development of web-based statewide pavement management system; and a general introduction of the statewide pavement management with focuses on: 1) pavement data collection and accompanying quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) process; 2) performance measures and targets; and 3) single- and multi-year decision making (e.g., decision matrix, decision tree, optimization, scenario analysis, forecasting and budgeting). By focusing more on a general overview rather than the technical details which have already been discussed on various occasions, this paper is intended to provide readers with some insight into the helpful tips and potential issues regarding management of pavement networks.