Towards Developing Environmental Sustainability Performance Measures for Pavement Asset Management Practice

The functionality of performance measurement approach is valuable in Pavement Management Systems (PMSs) to account for different criteria in the decision-making process. However current paradigm of asset management decisions made within pavement management systems only prioritizes resource allocation polices that maximizes the serviceability performance of the road network with no consideration of the environmental sustainability. This is the essence of incorporating environmental sustainability into pavement management The reduction of material consumption and greenhouse gas emission when maintain and rehabilitating road networks can achieve added benefits including improved life cycle performance of pavements, reduced climate change impacts and human health effect due to less air pollution, improved productivity due to optimal allocation of resources and reduced road user cost. The growing awareness of the impacts of road transportation networks on the ecosystem, demands accountability for environmental performance, thus there is need to incorporate environmental performance measure into pavement asset management practices. To address this challenge, this present work focuses on developing a core set of environmental sustainability performance measures for pavement management. The ultimate goal is to develop a framework to incorporate environmental sustainability in pavement management systems for network-level maintenance programming. In order to achieve this goal, this paper present the first step, intention is to review the previous studies for environmental sustainability indicators, as well as the suitability of the indicators for the evaluation of the sustainability in pavement management. A next step will involve an industry and agency survey to identify the state-of-practice trends in environmental performance measurement, highlight data available and data needed, and propose the framework to incorporate measures into network-level sustainable maintenance and rehabilitation programming.