Abstract:

In order to explore an economic and effective approach to asphalt pavement maintenance and to reduce the maintenance cost,a life-cycle economic evaluation of the preventive maintenance practice on asphalt pavement is carried out. In the investigation,first,with the help of survival models,the pavement observation data from the California Department of Transportation are used to develop the life-cycle performance models for preventive asphalt pavement treatments specially for cracking distress. Then,a performance-cost model of the pavement is established based on the probability analysis. Finally,the economy of preventive maintenance under different failure criteria is analyzed and is compared with that of corrective maintenance. The results indicate that,in the life cycle of the detected pavement,the continuous preventive maintenance averagely saves the cost by 27% as compared with the corrective maintenance,that an average cost saving of 17% can be achieved when two preventive maintenance actions are coupled with one corrective maintenance action,and that more saving can be achieved by applying preventive maintenance at earlier stages of pavement distress.

Key words: pavement engineering, asphalt pavement, preventive maintenance, survival model, life cycle, economic evaluation