This paper presents a procedure for determining priority ratingsof highway routine maintenance activities by highway class and distress condition. In contrast to the common practice of assigning priority ratings based on an aggregated pavement condition index, a scheme that generates maintenance activity specific priority ratings wasadopted in this study. Since there exists a large number of maintenance activity--highway class--distress severity combinations to be rated, a partitioned two-stage survey procedure was adopted to reducethe number of factors in each rating phase to a size manageable by raters. This rating procedure was used to obtain priority factors for routine maintenance activities in indiana. These priority data have been incorporated into an optimal routine maintenance programming model proposed for use at the district and subdistrict levels of theindiana department of highways. Using the application as an example, the paper describes the salient features of the procedure and the steps involved in computing the final priority scores for individualmaintenance activities. It also provides an analysis of the indianadata to demonstrate how other useful information on routine maintenance practice could be derived from this form of study. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1246, Winter maintenance, roadside management, and rating routine maintenance activities.
Abstract