Pavement condition and traffic indices for prioritizing road maintenance

Maintenance prioritization is a regular challenge that transportation departments face. They periodically have to choose among many roadway sections the ones that take precedence over others when it comes to the order of rehabilitation. They typically follow methodologies that consider only pavement condition for prioritizing roadways, without considering the number of the users. Presented herein is the way information provided by automated techniques for pavement and traffic evaluation is transformed into a numerical metric that can be utilized for maintenance prioritization purposes. The contribution of the proposed system can be summarized in: (1) the implementation of two entropy-based classification approaches (change-point detection and thresholding) for detecting “distressed pavement” areas; (2) the development of a pavement condition index that is a continuous variable; and (3) the creation of maintenance prioritization index based on both pavement condition and traffic.