Pavement maintenance prioritization of urban roads using analytical hierarchy process

Abstract

For a highway agency, it is not possible to take up the maintenance requirements for all road sections within a network at a time due to budget constraints. This makes a need for priority ranking model to select and schedule road sections for maintenance treatments according to their maintenance needs. The objective of this study is to use Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for developing a priority ranking model for maintenance of urban roads. The priority model has also been developed using Direct Assessment (DA) method and results were compared with AHP model. In Direct Assessment method, the experts were asked to rate the importance of each parameter affecting the road maintenance, on a scale of 0 to 100 percent whereas in AHP the experts were asked to make a pair-wise comparison between the parameters based on Saaty's scale i.e. 1 to 9. The pair wise comparison matrix was prepared and evaluated for inconsistencies using Expert Choice version 11 software. Statistical tests were performed to show that the collected data exhibited good consistency and repeatability. The developed priority ranking models has been applied to an urban road network of Noida city, near Delhi, consisting of 21 urban road sections. © Chinese Society of Pavement Engineering.