ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF LOCAL HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE.

This paper presents a computer program which uses the present worth of life-cycle costs as a basis to select the most cost-effective maintenance strategy to apply to local highway pavements. The program contains two other major subroutines which enable a sensitivity analysis to be conducted to examine the effects of variations of interest and inflation rates on the present worth estimate of each strategy, and, in addition, makes an estimate of the network funding needs for pavement sections during the years that work is to be performed. The program code-named UMASLIFE, is written is BASIS LANGUAGE to run on IBM PC and other compatibles. It requires no programming experience for its usage since information can be communicated to the computer in a manner similar to the user's technical vocabulary. Major outputs from the program include summaries of the present worth estimates of all strategies, sensitivity analyses and network funding reports of various types.