Title: INTEGRATING MAINTENANCE AND PAVEMENT MANAGEMENT
Abstract: There is a need to evaluate the use of pavement management in Maintenance operations for policy-making purposes in the area of preventive maintenance. Montana's Maintenance Division has been using pavement management for pavement preservation selection since 1997 to achieve continuous pavement improvements. Early experience suggests setting Department wide preventive maintenance policy on the basis of pavement management analysis is appropriate. Such a process does not restrict the freedom of managers to innovate in the field of pavement treatment development and does not limit manager's choices on project selection. Pavement management has been used increasingly by DOT's to help reduce the overall pavement condition burdens across the whole life cycle of the pavement with the aim of contributing to the development of sustainable project life cycles. Pavement management is a decision supporting tool for preventive maintenance, not a decision making tool. It should be used in conjunction with other tools to assist in identifying areas of potential condition improvement. Pavement Management based comparisons for preventive maintenance rarely produces a clear winner or loser but demonstrates the implications of different choices and the trade-offs needed to be made in project selection. Pavement management in Maintenance operations provides a flexible and dynamic alternative that is able to take into account local conditions rather than a rigid hierarchy of options for project selection. The overall aim of this integration of pavement management and Maintenance is to maximize the efficiency of resource used across all 28,000-lane miles of highways that Maintenance is responsible for in Montana. Efforts in Montana to develop a truly integrated pavement management system, which uses a range of options to reduce the overall duplication of effort and facilitate better discussions and decisions on pavement preservation, has proven to be successful. Clearly, PvMS is not a panacea for all our pavement preservation issues. It is a decision supporting tool not a decision making tool, that should be used in conjunction with other tools for program decision-making. However, Montana has shown that PvMS can be used to optimize both Maintenance operations specifically, as well as the agencies pavement program in general. PvMS also offers Maintenance managers the opportunity to ensure that the projects selected and built are promoting longer life of pavements and greater value for the driving public.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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