Impacts of pavement deterioration and maintenance cost on Pareto-efficient contracts for highway franchising

In a build-operate-transfer (BOT) highway project, pavement roughness progression generally has a direct impact on the highway maintenance cost and user costs. Given two common rehabilitation strategies, this study respectively investigates the optimally designed highway capacity and tolls of multi-type vehicles in Pareto-efficient contracts. Under supplementary conditions, it proves that the optimal toll revenue could fully cover the highway construction and maintenance cost in these contracts, no matter with or without the regulated traffic composition. Further extensions are made to evaluate and identify properties of the highway v/c ratio, rehabilitation period or critical roughness under the two rehabilitation strategies, respectively.