Incorporating inspection decisions in pavement management

Pavement management systems need to address not only maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) decisions, but also facility inspection decisions. The state of the art in pavement management is lacking of any consistent methodology for making such decisions on a cost-effectiveness basis. Such a methodology must recognize the presence of interactions between M&R and inspection decisions. These interactions argue for a joint decision-making approach, where the sum of inspection and M&R costs is minimized. This paper reviews different possible mathematical formulations to such a joint decision-making model, having various levels of restriction and computational complexity. These formulations are then compared and the effect of the forecast uncertainty on the minimum expected costs produced by each of them is investigated empirically. It is concluded that optimizing inspection decisions jointly with M&R decisions can lead to substantial cost savings, especially for high precisions of forecasting.