Project Selection and Prioritization of Pavement Preservation

Several methods help agencies select and prioritize pavement preservation projects. Often these methods are built within an agency's pavement management system. Unfortunately, these decision support tools often produce recommendations that do not match actual decisions, particularly for project selection of pavement management. Ad hoc selection procedures for preservation projects may be effective for many highway agencies. Fiscal constraints and pressure from administrators and legislators, however, have forced agencies to justify their use of funds. This paper offers a new method for the selection and prioritization of pavement projects, with the use of the analytic hierarchy process as its multicriteria decision-making platform. The new method uses several parameters and input from decision makers to create a prioritized preservation project list. The method was applied in a case study in Texas; projects suggested by the method matched actual decisions 75% of the time. The ability to capture multiple parameters and determine weights for each parameter on the basis of decision-maker input, along with the high level of agreement between the method and actual decisions, indicated that the method could be a viable decision support tool.