Pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation Optimization Model by Considering User Costs for Iran

The Pavement management system can be seen as a process that is attempting to reduce the life-cycle costs of the road network over time. Meanwhile, the optimal scheduling of maintenance treatments plays a significant role in decreasing agency costs. This paper proposes an approach for road maintenance programming that uses multi objective optimization. This model has been used with a case study involving the Boeein Zahra Saveh road network, a district of Iran. Pavement performance prediction also modeled as a Markov decision process. In this article, we evaluate two objective functions: (1) minimizing the total agency costs; and (2) minimizing the road user costs. Based on the optimal scheduling, the agency costs and user costs are estimated to be 21.5 and 13534 billion Rials in the entire planning horizon, respectively. This indicates that the user costs are much greater than the agency costs user costs are. Therefore we should consider the user costs in the management decisions. The result shows that preventive maintenance has more effect on decreasing the user costs compered to the asphalt overlay. Furthermore, the results from this model show the amount of MandR cost in the early years plays a significant role in decreasing agency costs. In other word, they should allocate enough budgets for their activities in the early years.