Timing of Preventive Highway Maintenance: A Study from the Whole Life Cycle Perspective

As the mileage of China’s highways increases, the focus of highway development has shifted from construction to maintenance and management. With the rapid increase in highway traffic, the overuse of highways, combined with the effects of climate change, has accelerated the occurrence of highway problems and poses new challenges to maintenance strategies. From a system optimization perspective, this paper examines the problem of determining the optimal timing of preventive maintenance on highways. To overcome the shortcomings of this method, which cannot reflect the economic benefits and costs, the total benefits and costs were calculated for different pavement ages within a given analysis period, based on the framework of life cycle analysis. The maintenance timing program with the highest cost-benefit ratio was taken as the optimum maintenance timing program and an example analysis was adopted to validate the feasibility of this method. When the timing of preventive maintenance is later in a pavement’s life cycle, the total life cycle benefit decreases while the total life cycle cost increases. Compared to previous studies, this paper considers both direct and indirect influences simultaneously, showing that indirect influence contributes to shortening the timing of pavement preventive maintenance.