The success of a maintenance management system depends largely on the efficiency of the maintenance program that is produced. An efficient maintenance program is the program that identifies what maintenance action to be taken and where and when to apply it so that the most cost-effective results are obtained. The process used to answer these questions is called the maintenance priority setting. Three priority-setting techniques are presented along with the results of their applications on the data collected from the Egyptian road network. The first technique is a simple ranking based on current year condition data. The second is a modified ranking technique that considers the future condition of pavement sections, and the third is a near optimization, one that considers both time (current and future) and space (entire network). A comparison of the techniques in terms of network condition over time and budget deficit is presented. The results indicate a considerable difference in future network performance under the three techniques, with the optimization technique producing the best results. (A)
Abstract