Developing Pavement Maintenance Strategies and Implementing Management Systems

The traffic volume and maintenance demand on Taiwan’s provincial highways have been steadily increasing. One of the most challenging issues in maintenance is determining the optimal timing and allocation of funds to avoid duplicative investments and maximize resource utilization. Currently, provincial highway maintenance units rely heavily on manual processes and paper-based records, using experiential methods to formulate maintenance strategies and conduct maintenance operations. This indicates a lack of objective maintenance strategies and pavement management systems in these units. This study aims to address this gap by integrating domestic and international literature on pavement maintenance decision-making. Existing approaches typically fall into two categories: “Pavement Indicator Rating” and “Pavement Maintenance Prioritization”. However, there has not been research integrating these methods for decision-making. Therefore, this research integrates these two approaches to establish a comprehensive maintenance strategy for Taiwan’s provincial highways. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is employed as the decision-making theory, involving expert interviews to calculate maintenance weights for different pavement maintenance indicators. The results show that the pothole count, International Roughness Index (IRI), and Pavement Condition Index (PCI) are the three most critical maintenance indicators. The first phase of the maintenance strategy uses the “Pavement Indicator Rating“ to directly assess the pothole count, IRI, and PCI to categorize pavement sections as “maintenance sections” or “observation sections”. The second phase employs “Pavement Maintenance Prioritization”, integrating maintenance weights for each indicator to calculate maintenance scores. This phase prioritizes maintenance activities based on the results of the first phase’s rating for “maintenance sections”. Additionally, a provincial highway pavement management system is proposed to implement these strategies, enhancing maintenance management efficiency and ensuring the overall quality and longevity of provincial highway maintenance efforts.