The Research On Decision-Making For Fund Allocation In Pavement Maintenance

Pavements deteriorate over time due to accumulated damage fromvehicles usage. The road network preservation has become a prior work fortransportation departments of China and a more accountable usage oflimited budget and the available funding seems to be more and moreimportant. In the past, the department of highway management is devoid ofthe systematic testing, evaluation and scientific decision-makingmanagement structure for highway maintenance. Consequently, themaintenance procedure mainly depended on a qualitative understanding ofthe condition of the road and on the experience of the engineers involved.So, usually the resource allocation of funds will not be accurate andscientific.In this paper a decision-making method for pavement maintenance isproposed within the constraint of limited amount of conservation funds,thereby seeking the maximal social and economic benefits. This problemcan be considered as a resource allocation optimization problem. TheParticle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method has been proven to besuccessful for decision-making. The study aims at developing an efficientsolution for solving a fund-constrained highway pavement maintenanceproblem, and thus to introduce the application of the PSO algorithm intothe field of resource allocation optimization. Numerical test shows that themodel and the algorithm are of practical value.