A bottom-up optimal pavement resurfacing solution approach for large-scale networks

Pavement management systems have been implemented across the world by transportation agencies in recent decades. To support these applications, increasingly sophisticated methods have been developed to model pavement deterioration and solve for optimal management strategies. Recently a simpler optimization approach for the system-level resurfacing problem has been developed, which is bottom-up rather than top-down, preserving facility-specific features to develop informative budget allocation results (Sathaye and Madanat, 2011). In this paper we expand upon and enhance this approach for application to large-scale, heterogeneous road networks. The methodological enhancements allow for the approach to be applied to a broader spectrum of real-world problems and efficiently for large-scale networks. These developments are implemented and presented in a case study which uses empirical models. The results are shown to be robust to deterioration model uncertainty, which is consistent with previous findings for small networks and single facilities.