Pavement Maintenance Treatment Scheduling Using a Tree-Based Selection Algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents and compares a tree-based road treatment scheduling system with the more traditional rule-based system using a real-world road network of 1,335 road segments. The tree-based road treatment scheduling system effectively evaluates if a particular treatment should be applied in a later year instead of the current year or if an alternative ‘holding’ treatment should be applied to minimise expenditure. As a consequence, the tree-based road treatment scheduling system evaluates all feasible solutions as compared to the traditional rule-based system, which is basically a greedy search that applies rules that trigger treatments based on intervention levels in a predefined hierarchical order, which produces a single solution and does not evaluate all feasible solutions. The performance of the tree-based road treatment scheduling system was evaluated on road networks of up to 25,000 segments. For a 1,335 road segment network, the work program produced by the tree-based system was costed at 82.3% of that produced by the rule-based system, whilst complying with all stipulated maximum condition constraints.