2020 International Conference on Sustainable and Innovative Infrastructure

Tainan, Taiwan,22-24Oct 2020

INCORPORATING UNCERTAINTY IN MAINTENANCE SCHEDULING

OPTIMIZATION OF A ROAD NETWORK
Sakthivelan Ramachandran 1 and Veeraragavan Amirthalingam 2
1
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India.
E-mail:sakthivelan.ramachandran@gmail.com
2
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India.
E-mail: av@iitm.ac.in

ABSTRACT

India has the second-largest road network in the world, spanning a total of over 5 million km.
The combined total length of National Highways and Expressways is 1,32,500 km as per the
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MORTH) and about US$ 745 million is spent
annually for the maintenance of the National Highways network in the country. This constitutes
only 2.2% of the total road network. The remaining part of the road network consists of State
Highways, Major district roads, and other district roads. The fund required for the maintenance
of the entire network is very huge and too far from the budget availability. This urges and
warrants an effective maintenance planning to preserve the pavements at the desired level of
performance under restricted funds.

The effectiveness of maintenance planning depends on pavement distress prediction and the
effectiveness of treatments. In the present study, uncertainties are incorporated in the
performance behavior and a probabilistic approach is developed. The distresses are expressed as
roughness (IRI derived from Fifth Wheel Bump Integrator) and deflection (Rebound deflection
acquired from Benkelman Beam Deflectometer). Five treatment scenarios are considered:
namely, do-nothing, thin surfacing, thick overlay, rehabilitation, and reconstruction. The distress
progression models and treatment effectiveness models are considered from literature and
validated with the limited available field data. Accordingly, Distress Transition Probability
Matrices (D-TPM) and Treatment Effectiveness Transition Probability Matrices (TE-TPM) for
treatment scenarios are developed. The condition vectors of the pavements are obtained from the
probability distribution as a proportion of each state that the distress derived from TPMs.
A methodology is proposed and implemented in MS Excel spreadsheet. Optimization is performed
with the Excel Solver for scheduling maintenance treatment that incorporates uncertainty in distress
prediction.

Keywords: uncertainty, maintenance scheduling, optimization, road network, pavement,

probabilistic approach, transition probability matrices, roughness, deflection.