Cost-effectiveness evaluation of highway flexible pavement routine maintenance
Abstract
This dissertation deals with three major issues related to routine maintenance of highway flexible pavements in Indiana. First is the evaluation of roadway and shoulder maintenance activity expenditures. The second issue is the evaluation of the impact of various individual and groups of maintenance activities on pavement surface condition. The third issue involves the analysis of cost-effectiveness of different maintenance scenarios. The first issue included the analysis of total routine maintenance expenditure trends over the period of 1984 to 1986, distribution of total maintenance cost by maintenance activity, and correlation between annual expenditures and that between shares of different activities of total expenditures. The second issue involved an evaluation of the effect of routine maintenance on pavement surface roughness and serviceability. Means of indicators for groups of pavement sections receiving maintenance and groups not receiving maintenance were compared to determine if the difference in the means were statistically significant. To quantify the impact of maintenance, maintenance effect models were developed. The third issue involved the development of a life-cycle cost algorithm that can be used to determine the most cost-effective maintenance scenario. The costs included in the evaluation were annual routine maintenance, annual user costs, seal coating costs and resurfacing costs at the end of a life cycle. The analysis of routine maintenance expenditures illustrated trend of higher roadway and shoulder maintenance costs for Other-State highways (OSH) than for Interstate highways (ISH). In general the average roadway maintenance cost of OSH was about 85% to 120% higher than that of ISH. Patching and crack sealing activities contributed to about 70% of total roadway maintenance cost. Shoulder maintenance on OSH was observed to contribute to about 30% of the total cost of the maintenance activities considered in this study. The testing of significance of pavement condition means yielded three groups of findings: the first group contained activities that demonstrated a definitely significant impact on either pavement roughness and/or pavement serviceability; the second group, activities that demonstrated marginally significant impact; and the third, activities that could not be confirmed either way. The life cycle cost analysis indicated that periodic maintenance activities such as seal coating are only stop-gap measures allowing flexibility in capital spending and not a cost-effective solution to pavement deterioration problem.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Sinha, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Civil engineering
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