The price of uncertainty in pavement infrastructure management planning: An integer programming approach

Currently there is a true dichotomy in the pavement maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) literature. On the one hand, there are integer programming‐based models that assume that parameters are deterministically known. On the other extreme, there are stochastic models, with the most popular class being based on the theory of Markov decision processes that are able to account for various sources of uncertainties observed in the real‐world. In this paper, we present an integer programming‐based alternative to account for these uncertainties. A critical feature of the proposed models is that they provide –a priori – probabilistic guarantees that the prescribed M&R decisions would result in pavement condition scores that are above their critical service levels, using minimal assumptions regarding the sources of uncertainty. By construction of the models, we can easily determine the additional budget requirements when additional sources of uncertainty are considered, starting from a fully deterministic model. We have coined this additional budget requirement the price of uncertainty to distinguish from previous related work where additional budget requirements were studied due to parameter uncertainties in stochastic models. A numerical case study presents valuable insights into the price of uncertainty and shows that it can be large.