Development and application of a pavement maintenance decision support system for Egypt

Pavements are considered the mam vem of economic growth in every country ,as they facilitate the movement of people and goods. They are the major capital investment which should be expected to show an adequate return on xpenditure . Pavements will be deteriorated under the effect of different conditions of loading and environment , which in turn accelerates the rates of pavement performance losses . So they need maintenance from time to time tomaintain them properly at a high standard of serviceability . The time and level of maintenance is a function of a complex set of constraint variables such as limited funds and serviceability of the pavement . Furthermore , there are economicrestraints are being imposed on the highway network due to decreased revenues , high inflation and an mcrease in the required maintenance / rehabilitation of the existing network . This arises the need to manage pavement maintenance and todevelop a pavement maintenance decision system capable to assist d cisionmaking for identifying maintenance needs subject to limited resources.The goal of the proposed research was based on developing a pavementmaintenance Decision Support System ( DSS ) for Egypt highway network. Theintention of the DSS was to provide a basis to the decision maker ( or the topmanagement) to be used as a framework for setting pavement maintenanceplanning and priorities for Egypt highway network . Four, different, ranking techniques and a combined index ranking technique were used beside anoptimization technique . These techniques were used for setting pavement maintenance priorities under the different proposed constraints of budget ,pavement condition, traffic, .... etc . Also, different models were developed and others were predicted to be used in the Life Cycle Cost analysis ( LCC ) process .