Capital budgeting problems in pavement maintenance

This paper models a class of capital budgeting problems in pavement maintenance as nonlinear discontinuous programming problems and presents a solution procedure. The objective of the models developed is to determine if certain road segments should be rehabilitated in the given year (resurfaced, reconstructed or patched), or major maintenance postponed for at least another year. If the road is to be rehabilitated, some variation in funds expended is possible. The marginal return within the allowable interval of variation is estimated to be nonlinear. Two basic models are presented. The first assumes the rehabilitative alternative or design is fixed, and hence the problem has a single linear constraint imposed by the budget. The second is the design selection problem and contains multiple choice constraints in addition to the budget constraint. An illustrative example is included.