Pavement maintenance and rehabilitation planning optimisation under budget and pavement deterioration uncertainty

One of the key parts of a pavement management system is the maintenance and rehabilitation planning. The planning is usually developed under the assumption that all parameters are known with certainty. In practice, there are various parameters afflicted with large uncertainty. Ignoring the uncertainty may lead to a suboptimal plan adversely affecting the network conditions. The objective of this study is to develop an optimisation framework for network-level pavement maintenance and rehabilitation planning considering the uncertain nature of pavement deterioration and the budget with an applicable approach. A multistage stochastic mixed-integer programming model is proposed to find the optimal plan that is feasible for all possible scenarios of uncertainty and optimise the expectation of objective function. Two case studies of 4 and 21 pavement sections are presented to show the applicability of the proposed method. The value of stochastic solution and the expected value of perfect information which are the indices for evaluating the benefits of using the stochastic model are, respectively, 30% and 85% of the objective function of here and now model for the first case study and 26% and 42% of it regarding the second one. The indices are high indicating the effectiveness of the stochastic solution.