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The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is concerned about the widening gap between preservation needs and available funding. Funding levels are not adequate to meet the preservation needs of the roadway network; therefore projects listed in the 4-Year Pavement Management Plan must be ranked to determine which projects should be funded now and which can be postponed until a later year. Currently, each district uses locally developed methods to rank and prioritize projects. These ranking methods have relied on less formal qualitative assessments based on engineers' subjective judgment. It is important for TxDOT to have a rational 4-Year Pavement Management Plan. The objective of this study is to develop a conceptual framework that describes the development of the 4-Year Pavement Management Plan and a proposed ranking process. It can be largely divided into three steps; (1) Network-Level preliminary project screening process, (2) Project-Level project ranking process, and (3) Economic Analysis. A rational pavement management procedure and a project ranking method that are accepted by districts and the TxDOT administration will maximize efficiency in budget allocations and help improve pavement condition. As a part of this study, based on the data provided by the Austin District Pavement Engineer, the Network-Level Project Screening (NLPS) tool, including the candidate project selection algorithm and the preliminary project screening matrix, is developed. The NLSP tool has been used by the Austin District Pavement Engineer (DPE) to evaluate the PMIS (Pavement Management Information System) data and to prepare a preliminary list of candidate projects for further evaluation. The automated tool will help TxDOT engineers easily incorporate the developed mathematical algorithm into their daily pavement maintenance management.
Focusing on the process of pavement management, this text covers topics such as data acquisition and evaluation, network level priority programming and project level design. Examples of working systems are provided, as well as guidance for implementation.
Pavement management is one of the primary responsibilities for departments of transportation and other municipalities across the country. Efficient and proper use of taxpayer dollars to preserve and improve the existing transportation system has never been more important due to the current fiscal environment. Agencies use pavement management systems to store data describing the state of the network. This information is often used to help make decisions regarding the location of pavement preservation actions. There is often a discrepancy between the need estimates of network-level pavement management systems and where and how pavement preservation and improvement dollars are actually spent (i.e., actual pavement preservation and improvement projects). This research focuses on evaluating the Texas Department of Transportation's (TxDOT) Pavement Management Information System (PMIS) to assess the agreement between its need estimates and actual construction projects at the district level. The research revealed there is little agreement between the output of PMIS's Needs Estimate tool and actual construction projects. Possible reasons for this disagreement include the inability of PMIS's Needs Estimates to consider the decision makers preferences and priorities, and also its inability to consider multiple years of condition data simultaneously. Through the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the research was able to capture the effect of several variables on the decision making process. Using this method, pavement project suggestions were created that more closely matched actual projects than what the current Needs Estimate tool suggests. The projects selected using the new method were then tested against actual construction within three counties of the Bryan district. The new method closely matches actual preservation decisions made by the district within these three counties.