A bottom-up solution for the multi-facility optimal pavement resurfacing problem

Transportation infrastructure management has been a subject of growing economic importance in recent years due to the magnitude of agency expenditures. Increasingly sophisticated methods have been developed to model pavement deterioration and solve for optimal management strategies. However, it is unclear whether these more complex methods are providing more useful results. This paper presents a simple approach for optimizing the frequency and intensity of resurfacing for multiple highway facilities. It builds upon existing optimization methods for the single-facility, continuous-state, continuous-time problem and corresponding results, which include a threshold structure for optimal solutions. This threshold structure allows for mathematical simplifications and for a straightforward optimization approach to be applied to the multi-facility case. The approach is bottom-up rather than top-down, preserving facility-specific features to develop informative budget allocation results. Application of the approach in a case study indicates that solutions are likely to be robust to deterioration model uncertainty, which is consistent with previous facility-level findings. In addition, the methodology is shown to be robust to the form of the deterioration model.

Research highlights
► An optimization approach for solving the multi-facility pavement resurfacing problem is presented.
► The approach builds on previous results for the single-facility, continuous-time, continuous-state problem.
► The approach is bottom-up, allowing for the account for facility-specific features.
► The approach is shown to be robust to deterioration model parameter uncertainty and function form.
► The optimization approach is an attractive alternative to standard methods.