Developing a simplified maintenance & rehabilitation activity prioritization tool for afghanistan roads

Abstract

Roads are one of the most important factor of life, and maintenance & rehabilitation of them are very vital and challenging for a country. Afghanistan is one of those countries which face the challenges of low-budget, computerized office works and skilled personnel. Regarding to budget limitation pavement maintenance and rehabilitation activity prioritization is obligatory. Currently, a technology based and simplified maintenance activity prioritization tool are an essential need of the country. The aim of this research is to develop a tool which prioritize the maintenance and rehabilitation activities by considering some factors such as pavement condition index, road width, traffic volume, residential importance as well as maintenance and rehabilitation cost. Since characterizing a model that presents each one of those variables was difficult, a simplified model named TOPSIS was denoted for the issue of prioritization. TOPSIS model lets you have a more precise ranking for the outcome. Considering the problem, Visual Basic have the ability to easily code any type of model and present a graphical display of the model. A source code was developed and Visual Basic was used for computations coding, graphical display of results and generating reports. The developed model indicates that more than two criteria/weighs are very important for prioritizing the alternatives/activities. The developed tool can prioritize the maintenance and rehabilitation activities and generate different database for further use in ArcGIS.