Pavement maintenance of small municipalities: Evaluation of the quality evolution for different budget scenarios

Within Road Asset management, pavement management plays a key role. Nowadays urban manager are facing giant issues in planning maintenance interventions due to lack of funding or sub-obtimal planning policies. In order to provide a sound and simple methodological approach to tackle this problem, a model to develop pavement management systems at network level is presented. The model is based on performance indicators, according to the approaches proposed in recent COST projects, that are weighted in order to derive Comfort, Safety, Structural and Environmental Global Indexes based on visual inspections and traffic data collected on site. Evolution of these indexes has been derived by statistical regression approach and Markov Chain models are calibrated in order to forecast the evolution of network pavement quality according to several budget scenarios. The framework developed so far has been applied to a case study of a small municipality and preliminary results seems to indicate that this approach may provide a useful tool for a sounder an optimal planning of pavement management.