Optimization of Pavement Preservation Activities

Alberta Transportation has initiated a pavement preservation strategy. This strategy calls for the proactive management of the condition of pavements, from time of initial construction, throughout its entire life, to the time of rehabilitation or reconstruction. All types of surface treatments are used as part of a comprehensive, cost-effective and optimized preservation program. A review of best practices found that Life Cycle Cost Analysis in the planning and programming of projects is becoming the accepted practice in the United States, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Coupled with this has been the development of sophisticated decision support systems to aid transportation agencies in the creation of optimized, integrated multi-year work programs; notably the World Road Association’s HDM-4 and, more recently, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration’s HERS-ST. Alberta Transportation conducted a pilot study in the summer of 2003 to determine how such an approach could be applied in Alberta. The pilot study showed that an economic analysis-based decision support system can be successfully used on Alberta’s provincial highway network to optimize the development of a multi-year pavement preservation work program. However, such a system has extensive data requirements and requires a comprehensive asset inventory that includes physical, cost, vehicle, traffic and climatic data. This data must be collected and stored in a manner that is compatible with and readily accessible by the decision support system to minimize data entry and manipulation. The performance of the preservation treatments must be known in order to calibrate the model.