INCORPORATING INSPECTION DECISIONS IN PAVEMENT MANAGEMENT

Pavement management systems need to address not only maintenance and r ehabilitation (M&R) decisions, but also facility inspection decisions. The state of the art in pavement management is lacking of any consist ent methodology for making such decisions on a cost-effectiveness basi s. Such a methodology must recognize the presence of interactions betw een M&R and inspection decisions. These interactions argue for a joint decision-making approach, where the sum of inspection and M&R costs i s minimized. This paper reviews different possible mathematical formul ations to such a joint decision-making model, having various levels of restriction and computational complexity. These formulations are then compared and the effect of the forecast uncertainty on the minimum ex pected costs produced by each of them is investigated empirically. It is concluded that optimizing inspection decisions jointly with M&R dec isions can lead to substantial cost savings, especially for high preci sions of forecasting.