A recent international trend in road maintenance contracting has been towards long term performance based contracts. In New Zealand, the long term objective on the state highway network is that approximately one third of the network will be maintained using such contracts. This paper addresses a number of issues based on New Zealand experience: the role of pavement modelling in the overall tender process; the translation of organisational objectives into technical analyses; issues of data quality and how they can be managed; the degree to which calibration can be achieved; and the need for sensitivity testing to highlight the level of confidence in the outputs. Recommendations are made on where further work is required in the future in order to improve the applicability of pavement modelling techniques to the performance based contracting process. (Author/publisher) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E208431.
Abstract