Integrated Model for Project‐Level Management of Flexible Pavements

Pavement management systems usually focus on life‐cycle cost as the most important criterion for selecting the optimal pavement strategy at the project level. Pavement management decisions, however, are made in the context of multiple and often conflicting objectives of users, operators, and highway agencies. This paper presents an integrated model for project‐level pavement management, which consists of a life cycle cost model and a costeffectiveness method. The life cycle cost model generates the feasible pavement strategies for a given highway segment and provides the design, performance characteristics, and various costs for each. The cost‐effectiveness method performs an evaluation, which leads to the identification of the optimal strategies. Analysis results of the proposed approach indicate that when the evaluation of pavement strategies explicitly recognizes the multiple types of costs as well as measures of pavement performance, life cycle cost affects the ranking of the strategies, but the optimal choice is often not that of minimum life cycle cost.