A Research Framework for Cost-Effective Highway Maintenance Planning

In recent years, various highway agencies and researchers have worked to develop efficient methods for maintenance planning, without much success. A major reason is that they usually neglect user inconvenience and delay costs, which alone can greatly exceed the maintenance costs. It is known that different maintenance plans have very different effects on users and on highway performance. These interactions have not been intensively explored, and the existing analysis methods are not quite satisfactory. To remedy the existing deficiencies, the development of a realistic and efficient maintenance planning methodology is proposed. Specifically, the proposed approach incorporates several components already developed for selecting and scheduling interdependent projects in transportation networks; however, it organizes them in a more efficient way. The proposed maintenance planning methodology can overcome the main weaknesses of prevailing methods and help decision makers to greatly reduce user costs and improve the efficiency of highway maintenance operations.