Use of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process in Pavement Maintenance Planning

In pavement management, prioritized resource allocation is imperative given the fact that there is rarely enough funding with highway agencies to address all the pavement sections. In view of the complexity involved in the decision making process, subjective evaluation based on expert’s judgments is unavoidable. Analytic Hierarchy process (AHP) has been applied by researchers to solve pavement resource allocation problems in a multiple criteria environment. However, it has been reasoned that uncertainties and vagueness in human perceptions and judgments have to be considered. A fuzzy AHP (FAHP) and fuzzy arithmetic methodology is proposed in this study for maintenance prioritization in pavement maintenance planning. The goal is to identify an approach that can reflect the intention of highway agency and engineers more closely during decision making process. Given the fact that there is no analytical technique or tool that permits one to make comparison on a theoretical basis, numerical examples are employed to evaluate the relative merits of different methods in this paper. The study concludes that the proposed fuzzy arithmetic method is suitable for the pavement maintenance prioritization process, based on its ability to prioritize pavement maintenance activities in good agreement with the Direct Assessment Method, and its operational advantage in evaluating a large number of maintenance activities.