An Innovative Strategy for Maintenance of Highway Pavement

Highway pavement are deteriorating fast due to lack of timely maintenance, leading to higher vehicle operating costs, increasing number of accidents etc. Thus, timely maintenance of the highway pavement is essential. Because, once pavements start to deteriorate; they deteriorate rapidly beyond the point where maintenance is effective. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop a strategy for maintenance of pavement in a huge highway network. In this study, an innovative strategy for maintenance of highway pavement is proposed. A two stage maintenance strategy is proposed. In stage I, it is proposed to determine priority of highway sections. In Stage II, priority of various maintenance activities to be carried out on various sections will be determined. Maintenance priority of the pavement is based on importance of the road sections, present road conditions, and future road conditions. The methodology proposed in this study is illustrated with the help of example of some hypothetical highway network consisting of 4 sections. Analysis results indicated that the proposed strategy is considered to be more rational, innovative & logical. Some strategies for maintenance of urban roads are also presented in this study. Therefore, it is expected that this study will be useful for maintenance of huge highway network in India and thus will be useful for preserving huge asset of pavement infrastructure.