Developing an Optimization Model for Managing County Paved Roads

In Wyoming, most county paved roads were built decades ago without following minimum design standards. However, the recent increase in industrial/mineral activities in the state requires developing an efficient pavement management system (PMS) for local paved roads. The new PMS which is currently being developed depends on the present serviceability index (PSI) as a pavement performance parameter. While developing a PMS for county roads, the primary process shows two major issues related to the pavement management of Wyoming’s county roads. The first issue includes the difficulty of measuring some pavement management parameters, such as suitable PSI prediction models for pavement and road roughness. The second issue relates to the high costs of pavement treatments within limited maintenance budgets. This study investigates these issues by developing exclusive PSI pavement prediction models to be more representative for county roads. In addition, smartphones were proposed as a cost-effective solution to minimize the costs of collecting pavement condition data. The initial validation results suggested that smartphones can predict with high certainty the actual values of road roughness represented by the international roughness index (IRI). An optimization methodology was then developed to identify the best mix of pavement preservation projects on county roads for maintaining pavement and improving safety. The maintenance planning takes budget limits, traffic volumes, weighted performance, and associated risk into accounts. It was found that the results from this report will facilitate a statewide implementation of a PMS for counties in Wyoming. The report can be downloaded at https://www.ugpti.org/resources/reports/downloads/mpc19-397.pdf