THE ROLE OF HDM-4 IN ROAD MANAGEMENT

The Highway Development and Management Tool known as HDM-4 is the successor to the World Bank Highway Design and Maintenance Standards Model (HDM-III). The scope of the new HDM-4 has been broadened considerably beyond traditional project appraisals, to provide a powerful system for the analysis of road management and investment alternatives. In addition to updating the HDM-III technical relationships for vehicle operating costs and pavement deterioration for flexible and unsealed pavements, new technical relationships have been added to model rigid concrete pavement deterioration, accident costs, traffic congestion, energy consumption, and environmental effects. HDM-4 incorporates 3 dedicated applications tools for project level analyis, road work programming under constrained budgets, and for strategic planning of long-term network performance and expenditure needs. HDM-4 is designed to be used as a decision support tool within a road management system. Standard data import and export facilities are provided for linking HDM-4 to various database management systems. Local adaptation and calibration of HDM-4 models can be achieved by specifying default data sets that represent pavement performance and vehicle resource consumption in the country where the model is being used.