This paper was presented at the `Strategies for enhancing pavement performance' session. The revolution in recycling techniques for rehabilitating flexible pavement over the past ten years or so has provided challenges to provincial and municipal road agencies. They are expected to make rational decision to ensure the best use of scarce financial resources in maintaining rapidly deteriorating road networks. All rehabilitation strategies are not equal and many have significant limitations with respect to their ability to solve specific road distresses. This paper describes a relatively simple process for decision making which is logical and defensible. It has been used extensively in the environmental field to assist with resolving such controversial issues as optimum siting for solid waste landfills. It comprises a number of steps. The first is to identify the evaluation criteria which are important to a particular agency and for a specific road rehabilitation project. These criteria are owner and project specific. In consultation with the owner, a relationship is developed between each criterion and its level of acceptability to the owner, with 1 designating complete acceptability and zero designating totally unacceptable. The second step is to assign weighting factors to each criterion identified as relevant. These weighting factors would represent what specific issues are important to the agency, whether it be capital costs, maintenance costs, road serviceability level, risk tolerance for premature failure, etc. The final step is to combine the level of acceptability with the weighting factor for each criterion and produce an overall rating for that rehabilitation strategy. Each viable option can then be represented by a single number between zero and 1, with the highest value being the preferred option and the one that best meets the agency's objective. (A)
Abstract