Pavement systems reconstruction and resurfacing policies for minimization of life‐cycle costs under greenhouse gas emissions constraints

Pavement management systems, designed to minimize total lifecycle costs, will need to evolve to meet the needs of the future. Environmental concerns are likely to add an additional consideration for the state DOTs when allocating their financial resources. Transportation agencies will be concerned with determining maintenance, resurfacing and reconstruction policies for pavement segments in their systems while also addressing the environmental impact of these activities. In this paper, we propose an efficient solution to solve for pavement resurfacing and reconstruction policies that minimize societal (agency and user) costs under a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions constraint. The main methodological contribution of this work relative to the state of the art is that we formulate the problem to include multi-dimensional pavement segment states and heterogeneous management activities. It allows for a more realistic representation of the majority of current pavements in the world. For example, the assumption that pavements are perpetual, i.e., do not need reconstruction during their lifetime, can be relaxed. A case study using California roads is performed; we find that, for that specific group of pavement segments, the optimal policies to minimize societal costs do not vary greatly from the policies that minimize GHG emissions. An agency can use these results to determine what GHG emission budgets are feasible for the highway system that it manages.