Evaluation of environmental sustainability of pavement preservation strategies using analytic hierarchy process

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.