Abstract:
Pavement management involves satisfying goals that are often multiple and conflicting such as
minimizing environmental, societal, economic impacts, and maximizing safety, level of service,
condition etc., and cannot be achieved simultaneously. Decision makers are required to select a single
maintenance strategy which closely meets their objectives and selection criteria. The set of criteria
may involve economic as well as environmental aspects, some of which may not be easily
quantifiable, thus requiring the use of qualitative judgments. Ranking approaches assign priorities to
either distresses or maintenance treatments, and arrive at a maintenance program based on a selected
set of criteria or preferences. A commonly used technique, in operations research, for prioritization of
alternatives is known as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Its ability to embrace both quantitative
and qualitative data through assignment of numerical values to qualitative data, and the significance
of its role as a decision making tool for building a targeted model makes this the preferred method for
prioritization. Therefore, this study explores the use of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for
prioritization of pavement rehabilitation treatments involving multiple criteria such as treatment cost,
serviceability, and environmental implications. A Hypothetical numerical example is presented to
illustrate the proposed framework for prioritizing 5 pavement rehabilitation techniques, namely, cold
in-place (CIR), hot in-place (HIR) surfacing, hot in-place repaving, hot in-place remixing, and hot
mix asphalt (HMA) overlay.
