The rams series of programs was developed to help the texas state department of highways and public transportation with is pavement management system activities. The evaluation of the rams district optimization program in selecting projects to maximize network benefitxdis described in this paper. The trial involved using the system to analyze decisions made by a specific texas district in 1985 to allocate its maintenance and rehabilitation (m&r) funds. Decisions made by the district staff were compared with those recommended by the optimization scheme. The rams-do1 program, the study indicated, has great potential to help the districts allocate their resources. However, only limited agreement was found between projects recommended by rams and those selected by the district staff. This was due to the following two reasons. First the district's needs greatly exceeded available funds. The overall district need for m&r work was estimated at $35 million, but the district's allocation was only $12.6 Million.Therefore, the district had many miles of pavement in substandard condition and only 36% of the funds necessary to address that need. The second reason was that the district concentrated its m&r selections on the higher volume roads, whereas rams selected both high- and low-volume projects. This selection was based on its objective function which calculates benefit caused by improving pavement condition independent of the traffic served. This indicated the need to expandthe rams objective function and a traffic factor was introduced in later runs. This paper appears in transportation research record no.1262, Planning, management and economic analysis 1990.
Samenvatting