Investment in infrastructure is considered the foundation for economic growth. However, traditional construction and maintenance methods in Egypt are carbon-intensive, which conflicts with sustainability strategies. Therefore, there was a need to develop a model for evaluating highway maintenance methods to facilitate decision-making on the best ones, economically, environmentally, and socially. This study included a model for evaluating sustainability in road maintenance. It integrated carbon management and value engineering to facilitate the selection of the best alternatives for achieving sustainability. The literature on sustainability criteria covering the project life cycle was consulted, and 27 key factors across the three sustainability criteria were selected. A questionnaire was conducted to determine the weights of the criteria using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Road maintenance scenarios were then developed, and the carbon emissions for each were calculated. The cost of carbon disposal was added to the project life cycle cost using CCS technology. This model was named SRMVE because it ultimately combines economic and environmental challenges into a single factor to facilitate a comparison of the proposed alternatives and achieve the best degree of sustainability. The model results were compared with the sustainability scores generated by the AHP to assess the extent of agreement. This model provides decision-makers with a way to sort through maintenance alternatives and identify those with the lowest lifecycle emissions while maintaining the service and safety levels.
Gabr et al. (Mon,) studied this question.