BACKGROUND: A variety of maintenance actions are performed by highway agencies to preserve highway pavements. Generally, highway agencies document information pertaining to maintenance actions such as methods, rates, bases of measurement, costs, performance, and other related factors as part of a maintenance management system. Similarly, agencies document information on pavement condition as part of a pavement management system. However, often these data collection efforts do not focus on the collection and analysis of data needed to improve pavement-maintenance decision-making. There is no widely accepted system that identifies the data needed to capture the factors that influence the performance of maintenance treatments, including climate conditions, traffic levels, existing pavement condition, material properties, and workmanship or the factors pertaining to pavement performance. There is a need to identify the key data elements required for evaluating maintenance-treatment effectiveness and effect on pavement performance and service life. These elements will constitute a framework for a database that can be used to establish the influence of maintenance actions on pavement performance and help identify and select the most effective treatment for specific conditions. Research is needed to develop a database system for collection, storage, and retrieval of pavement-maintenance-related data. This database together with clear definitions of maintenance items will provide a uniform format for collecting, reporting, and storing information on pavement maintenance. In addition to providing the data needed for evaluating maintenance-treatment effectiveness and helping with maintenance investment decisions, use of this database will promote compatibility of maintenance data reported by different agencies, ensure proper interpretation of the data, and facilitate sharing of data among highway agencies. This database will also provide an effective means for using these data in evaluating cost and performance of alternative maintenance applications, establishing the contributions of maintenance to pavement service life, or incorporating maintenance into pavement design and analysis procedures. 

 

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this research is to develop a database system of pavement-maintenance actions, materials, and methods, and their effectiveness. The database system shall provide a means for establishing a record of actions that includes uniform descriptions of maintenance activities, basis of measurement, costs, pavement condition, and other relevant data for use in cost-benefit analysis, evaluating the effects of maintenance on pavement performance, selection of maintenance actions, or other related decisions. The system shall accommodate asphalt, concrete, and composite pavements. The research will develop the database system, but will not be responsible for collecting/entering data into the database (except as called for in Task 7).

STATUS: Research is complete.  The research developed a pavement-maitenance database (PMDb) framework that provides a means for establishing a record of maintenance actions and data.  The research report togther with the PMDb framework  and the sample date used in the research have been published as NCHRP Report 820.