| Transportation is one of the significant factors for social development and national economy. After 30 years of rapid development and construction, the infrastructure of highway construction has been drawn the attention of the world. By the end of 2013, the expressway mileage in China had reached 104400 km and highway mileage was 4356200 km. These great achievements of road construction not only provide a convenient, fast, safeand comfortable travel service for the residents, but also provide transport guarantee for the rapid economy development, which greatly improved the society and economy development in China.During the currently continuous highway infrastructure construction phase, highway infrastructure maintenance and management also become the main task focus of the transportation in China. In 2012, when the average growth rate of investment in highway and expressway was lower than 1% or even at negative rate, the investment growth rate of provincial highway reconstruction was as high as 5.9%. In 2013, highway mileage in China reached about 4500000 km and the highway maintenance was almost to 4251400 km so the pavement maintenance rate was more than 97% per year, in which the provincial highway maintenance contributed more than 15%. The highway reconstruction investment grows as the annual rate of 6% and the whole investments for road facilities every year in terms of maintenance and transformation nearly reached over 500 billion RMB Yuan. Therefore, the efficient and scientific management of highway infrastructure maintenance seriously impacts the service level and efficiency of highway construction, which is also of great significance for future social and economic developments in China.After decades of highway construction, there has been formed a good technical and standard system for road construction. The systematic technology and specification system for road maintenance was also generated and developed. However, due to the fact that the road maintenance history is short, there are still many problems need to be solved for highway maintenance management, which described as following. First, China is a vast country with different areas that have different characteristics, so it is almost impossible to develop a unified model for pavement performance evaluation and prediction to cover all of these different areas. Second, previous pavement maintenance in China was put more emphasis on the technology and economy sides, which is not suitable for the current sustainable development requirements of low carbon and environmental protection so the unscientific maintenance approaches caused many traffic and environmental problems. Third, there has been not formed a systematical maintenance and design specification so maintenance decision and technological approaches are under investigation in both theory and practice. Finally, the environment and traffic condition at different regions are different, and the working conditions in pavement are also different. So how to exactly master the actual state inside the pavement structure and work out corresponding maintenance scheme is the actual working difficulty in practice.Theobjective of this paper is the asphalt pavement maintenance and operations management in Beijing. Based on the analysis of existing problems for the highway maintenance and management and the current pavement maintenance decision-making process and maintenance features, a comprehensive study was conducted on pavement performance evaluation, performance deterioration prediction and maintenance scheme decision as well as optimization problems. At the same time, with the test section results of internal working state in pavement structure, the internal temperature and strain conditions of pavement structure were also studied. Based on above analysis of pavement failure mechanism, the typical maintenance structure for asphalt pavement in Beijing was proposed.The main contents of this paper include:(1) Based on analysis of the highway maintenance history and the present situation in Beijing, a comprehensive investigation was conducted on the current expressway maintenance decision-making methods and characteristics in Beijing. Then the methodology and technological indicators for expressway maintenance were refined. The results show that the refined index is more consist with the actual situation of road pavement compared with the current evaluation indicators, thus, can provide better guidance on pavement maintenance decision.(2) Through the analysis of the past measured pavement performance data and long-term overhaul inspection data in Beijing, performance model was developed to predict the technical indexes of the expressway. In this paper, the developed model which account for the actual detecting state highway evaluation situation and not consider maintenance decay trend, can be respectively used in the pavement condition comparison and the pavement maintenance decision making. The final application results show that the performance prediction model proposed in this paper is of good accuracy and practicability, which is able to provides the theoretical guidance for maintenance decision.(3) Taking the life-cycle analysis as guidance and considering the construction cost, transportation and environmental costs, a multi-objectives expressway pavement maintenance decision-making model and methodology was proposed, which enable the highway maintenance to be achieved an comprehensive and optimal target cost in terms of economic, traffic impact and environmental benefit, which improved the scientific level of the expressway pavement maintenance decision.(4) Combined with the test road as a part of expressway pavement maintenance project in Beijing, monitoring equipment were embedded into pavement structure to measure environmental and mechanical parameters then the changes of internal strain, pressure, temperature inside the highway pavement structure were investigated. On this basis, the qualitative explanation of rutting deformation and crack diseases on asphalt pavement were analyzed and the corresponding typical maintenance pavement structure and method of expressway were proposed.In this paper, from both theoretical and practical sides, the proposed evaluation indicators for expressway pavement performance and decay model as well as the multi-objectives maintenance decision-making approach is able to provide the theoretical support for the decision-making process of expressway pavement maintenance. The proposed typical maintenance pavement structure and methodology is of good efficiency to provide guidance for highway maintenance in practice. |
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