Sustainable Pavement Management: How to Integrate Economic, Technical and Environmental Aspects in Decision-Making

Abstract

Sustainability, which is founded in the reconciliation of economic, environmental and social aspects, has become a major issue for infrastructure managers. The economic and environmental impacts of pavement maintenance are not negligible. More than 400 billion USD are invested globally each year in pavement construction and maintenance. These tasks increase the environmental impacts of vehicle operation by 10%. Because maintenance should be technically appropriate, it is important to integrate technical, economic and environmental aspects in the evaluation of maintenance alternatives over the life cycle of pavement. However, these aspects are normally assessed in different units that are difficult to combine in the decision-making process.This research examines and compares different methods for the integrated consideration of technical, economic and environmental aspects. This study aims to assist highway agencies, researchers and practitioners with the integration of these aspects for the sustainable management of pavement. For this purpose, a set of maintenance alternatives for asphalt pavements are evaluated. Different methods for the integration of these aspects are explored, leading to recommendations for the most suitable methods for different scenarios. Because of this analysis, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is recommended when the number of alternatives is reduced. In these situations, the AHP leads to results that are similar to those of the Weighting Sum and Multi-Attribute approaches that are frequently used for intuitive selection. However, when the number of alternatives is large, pair comparison becomes difficult when using the AHP and the Weighting Sum method becomes more appropriate.