Pavement maintenance standards define the level of condition at which pavements should be kept, and therefore have an important impact in the definition of budgets for road maintenance. Standards, defining when and how pavements should be maintained, have been developed in the past based on local engineering experience, research and more recently the use of economic models such as HDM-4. It has been argued that in some instances it would be beneficial to include other parameters when defining maintenance standards for pavements, such as the effects of their introduction on the natural environment, the society served by the road, as well as the economic implications of their adoption. A tool available for encompassing all the relevant criteria when developing maintenance standards for pavements is Multicriteria Analysis (MCA). Theoretical studies have been carried out in the past, which demonstrate that MCA is potentially a very useful tool when defining maintenance standards for pavements. MCA allows to take into account, several impacts (such as economical, environmental, social) of a number of alternative and competing maintenance standards and to select the one that satisfies the overall long-term goal. This study was aimed at introducing MCA to those responsible for the maintenance and management of Local Authority's pavements, in order to gauge their acceptability from several viewpoints: relevance to their modus operandi, ease of gathering all the required data and the ease of implementation. The concepts behind the logic of MCA and its applicability in the definition of pavement maintenance standards were explained to those responsible for the maintenance of pavements in a Local Authority in the United Kingdom. By means of a panel discussion, the following topics were followed: firstly, the definition of objectives to be achieved; secondly, the definition of attributes to measure the performance of a number of competing maintenance standards in achieving the pre-established objectives; and thirdly, discussions related to the ease with which data on the various attributes would be collected. The responses in the methodology were varied, but the Authority found the approach worthwhile. A number of rules for a pilot implementation were defined, together with a methodology that will allow Local Authorities to use this tool in the future. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Samenvatting