A new decision-making tool is helping design, construction, and traffic engineers select construction schedules that minimize traffic delay and agency costs on highway rehabilitation and reconstruction projects. CA4PRS (Construction Analysis for Pavement Rehabilitation Strategies) is a software package for estimating how much pavement can be rehabilitated or reconstructed under different traffic closure strategies with a project's constraints of pavement design, lane closure tactics, schedule interfaces, and contractor logistics and resources. CA4PRS evaluates "what if" scenarios for highway rehabilitation. It employs Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 in an MS Windows environment, with an MS Access 2000 database. A knowledge-based computer model, CA4PRS allows deterministic or probabilistic modes of operation; the probabilistic mode uses Monte Carlo simulations. Examples of field deployment of CA4PRS are briefly presented in this article. Also mentioned is a CA4PRS outreach and deployment program for pavement and traffic engineers, particularly in metropolitan districts.
Abstract