The City of Hamilton is in the process of developing an asset management system in an effort to
bring city’s infrastructure to grade B+ over ten years period. As one of the city’s most valuable
assets, the road network demands that the city uses a proactive management approach to
maintain the network in a safe and good condition. This paper present a decision support tool
that has been implemented for the city of Hamilton to facilitate the selection of the appropriate
rehabilitation strategy for city’s urban arterial and collector network. The tool is intended to be
incorporated later into the asset management system.
Key parameters that are known to highly impact rehabilitation selection such as road functional
class, pavement type, traffic volume, and current pavement condition were identified. The
combination of these various parameters resulted in a total of 54 scenarios to be evaluated.
Within each scenario, suitable rehabilitation strategies set were identified for further evaluation.
A comprehensive life cycle cost analysis based on incremental equivalent uniform annual cost
was conducted for all expected rehabilitations within each of the 54 scenarios in order to select
the most cost effective rehabilitation strategy. In addition, comparison among competing
alternatives within each scenario was demonstrated.
An automated spreadsheet-based decision support tool was implemented in order to assist the
City with evaluating competing rehabilitation strategies and selection of the most cost effective
strategy. Using the developed life cycle cost analysis tool, city staff can enter project specific
parameters and quickly have a print out of the list of feasible treatments along with the
corresponding life cycle cost analysis for these treatments.
