Pavement preventive maintenance treatment selection with multi-criteria decision making methods

Abstract

Highway transportation is one of the major transportation modes that plays a vital role in the development and economic growth of countries by providing convenient and relatively cheap transport between the origin and destination points. However, the construction of highway infrastructures consumes a huge amount of resources and requires significant investments. Regardless of how well designed and constructed, highways subjected to traffic loading and environmental effects deteriorate over time. Therefore, maintenance and rehabilitation operations are indispensable to overcome such issues and keep the highways in good condition within the pavement management framework yet traditional maintenance and rehabilitation activities necessitate the highway agencies to allocate a large portion of the budget. It is well-known that due to the growing highway network and aging of existing pavements, maintenance and rehabilitation costs become an economic burden on highway agencies with insufficient allocated budgets. Due to this reason, agencies are forced to do more with less money. Several studies have demonstrated that, instead of the "do nothing until the failure occurs" approach, proactive operations are better at reducing overall costs. In this regard, pavement preservation can be considered a promising approach. However, the selection of the most appropriate pavement preventive maintenance treatment according to the project-related conflicting criteria is another issue to cope with. Project-level treatment selection decisions are usually made by considering economic aspects and rely on the experiences of the highway agency staff. Yet, each project comes with its specific conditions and should be considered thoroughly to avoid additional costs and waste of resources as a consequence of unsuccessful treatment selection. In this study, multi-criteria decision making methods (MCDM) have been employed to select the most appropriate pavement preventive maintenance treatment for a dual highway section located in Istanbul, Türkiye to prolong its service life. The relevant section of the highway consists of newly constructed and rehabilitated subsections, it is 5 km in length, 15 m in width, and it was constructed with flexible pavement. In the decision making process, five teams consisting of senior-level experts working at related highway agencies have been involved as decision makers (DMs) and five well-known pavement preventive maintenance treatments have been preselected with the assistance of both a literature review and the DMs' experiences, namely: fog seal, slurry seal, microsurfacing, chip seal, and thin hot mix asphalt overlay. Based on the project requirements, eighteen criteria have been determined and these criteria have been cumulated under the five main criteria as follows: economy, environment, performance, safety, and existing conditions. Since there is not a single proper MCDM method for a particular decision making problem and each MCDM method comes with some deficiencies, hybrid MCDM methods have been adopted to overcome these issues. To weight the criteria, three MCDM methods have been employed: Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Bayesian Best – Worst Method (B-BWM), and Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (F-AHP) operating in deterministic, stochastic, and fuzzified environments, respectively. Obtained weights have been integrated with the two different MCDM methods, Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS), to rank the preselected alternatives. The ranking results have demonstrated a high level of similarity. For the combination of AHP-TOPSIS, F-AHP-TOPSIS, and B-BWM-TOPSIS methods, alternatives have been ranked as chip seal, thin hot-mix asphalt (HMA), microsurfacing, slurry seal, and fog seal, respectively. For the combination of AHP-COPRAS, F-AHP-COPRAS, and B-BWM-COPRAS methods, thin HMA has been selected as the most appropriate alternative followed by chip seal, microsurfacing, slurry seal, and fog seal.