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https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27432/critical-issues-in-transportation-for-2024-and-beyond

Balancing Life-cycle Cost and Life-cycle Impact Considerations in Pavement Management

Traditionally, pavement maintenance optimization has strived to find the balance between user costs due to pavement roughness and agency costs associated with roughness reduction. This research endeavors to expand beyond optimizing maintenance for life-cycle costs, to include greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions reduction. However, optimizing for one criterion may not produce the same results as optimizing for the other. Thus, this research aims to produce a tool that can predict, for a particular roadway network, how much it will cost to reduce various amounts of GHG emissions by altering pavement maintenance policies. Preliminary results indicate that there is a tradeoff between costs and emissions when developing a pavement maintenance policy. Use of a Pareto curve provides a visual tool to strike the proper balance for decision makers. From the curve can also be extracted cost-effectiveness data for policy implications. The proposed research will build on this preliminary research to develop a budget-constrained system-level version of the framework. Such a system-level analysis will allow decision-makers to identify optimal pavement management policies (for lifecycle impact minimization) in the presence of fiscal constraints.