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

The pavement management can be considered one of the most important element of the Road Asset management for both work volumes and economical investments. In the last years the planning of maintenance interventions represents a challenge to face for private and public road administrators. With the aim to provide a decision support tool, a methodological approach to develop pavement management systems at network level is proposed for small municipalities. According to the principles proposed in recent COST projects, the methodology defines Comfort, Safety, Structural and Environmental Global Indexes, derived from visual inspections and in situ traffic data, that are appropriately weighed in order to model their evolution by means of a statistical regression approach. Finally, basing on different budget scenarios, the degradation of network pavement quality has been predicted with Markov Chain models showing a more rational and efficient planning of pavement management.