Improving pavement networks by predicting the future
With around 4.18 million miles of roads in the United States, planning pavement maintenance can seem like a daunting process. Currently, departments of transportation (DOTs) tend to rely on past practices or expert opinion to make maintenance decisions. But with a $420 billion backlog of repairs for U.S. highways, these conventional methods are becoming less effective. Instead, DOTs require more quantitative approaches to manage their tight budgets and fix their aging roadways. In a recent paper in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) researchers Fengdi Guo, Jeremy Gregory, and Randolph Kirchain propose one such approach, known as Probabilistic Treatment Path Dependence (PTPD). PTPD performs better than conventional models, which would require a 10 percent additional annual budget to reach the same level of network performance in the given case study. CSHub researchers achieved this by confronting a fundamental concern that many conventional models shy away from: uncertainty. Comfortable with...