AHP-DEMATEL Based Research on the Influencing Factors of the Daily Maintenance Costs of China's National and Provincial Trunk Highways

Highway maintenance is equally crucial across borders; this paper first conducts statistics and case study research on daily federal and provincial highway maintenance costs in China's principal influencing factors. Finally, it looks at those results with the tools of AHP-DEMAT. Yet, the overall degree of influence of each factor of influence is collected to classify the significant influence factors. The results found that: the main factors influencing the daily maintenance costs of national and provincial trunk highways are: highway grade, traffic flow, service life, structure type, topography, pavement thickness, and pavement width; the influence of climate factors on costs can be adequately considered when formulating standards for daily maintenance costs for provinces/regions with a broad geographic range.

Don’t Pass Deferred Maintenance Costs to the Next Generation!: The Effects of Politics on State Highway Maintenance Spending

Routine maintenance spending for public infrastructure is critical for reducing life-cycle costs, and improving asset preservation and quality. Yet, states focus more on building new roads and expansion than maintaining existing assets’ conditions. Deferred maintenance costs are transferred to the future taxpayers, and they will eventually pay the expensive price. So far, there is little academic endeavor to examine the determinants of state and local routine maintenance spending. This study uses a panel data analysis covering 47 states from 1995 to 2009 to examine the effects of politics on state highway routine maintenance spending. The study finds that political incentive and conflict are key factors delaying state highway routine maintenance spending. The re-election-minded governors and legislatures tend to allocate less funding to maintenance to satisfy the current taxpayers. The study further finds that politically-divided states spend less on highway maintenance due to higher transaction costs in the policy-making process.

ANALYSIS ON OPTIMIZATION DECISION OF PAVEMENT MAINTENANCE MODE BASED ON ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS

With the rapid development of China's transportation and the improvement of people's living standards, China's highways have entered the peak maintenance period. According to the old road conditions and financial conditions, how to choose the appropriate maintenance technology to meet the technical and economic requirements of highway maintenance and construction projects has become a difficult problem faced by highway maintenance management departments. Therefore, based on the principle of index selection, this study comprehensively considered the impact of various factors on maintenance decision-making, determined four evaluation indexes, and systematically studied the compre-hensive decision-making system of asphalt pavement recycling maintenance. Based on the subjective-objective linkage and probability statistics method, the eigenvalue of the applicability of recycling mode was transformed to the same scale of 0 to 100, and the fuzzy scoring interval of the four bids was proposed. The calculation method of pavement quality recovery index (PQRI) and the analysis basis of economic benefits were clarified. Finally, the weight of each index was calculated by analytic hierarchy process, and the multi-index comprehensive decision-making method of pavement maintenance is constructed and used to theoretically verify and guide the actual road section. Results demonstrate that the proposed PQRI can realize the operability of quantifying the later operation of pavement. The weight of each index from big to small is PQRI > economic benefit > applicability of recycling mode. The recycled pavement quality recovery indices and applicability of the four recycling modes have small differences, and the proposed four bids interval makes the decision-making evaluation process more simple and explicit. The decision evaluation results of actual road section verify the rationality and practicability of the decision method. The conclusions are important for the maintenance and management of asphalt pavement recycling technology. Keywords: road engineering, recycling maintenance, intelligent decision-making, fuzzy evaluation

YOLO-Highway: An Improved Highway Center Marking Detection Model for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Autonomous Flight

Automatic visual navigation flight of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) plays an important role in the highway maintenance field. Automatic highway center marking detection is the most important part of the visual navigation flight of a UAV. In this study, the UAV-viewed highway data are collected from the UAV perspective. This paper proposes a model named the YOLO-Highway that uses an improved form of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) model to enhance the real-time detection of highway marking problems. The proposed model is mainly designed by optimizing the network structure and the loss function of the original YOLOv3 model. The proposed model is verified by the experiments using the highway center marking dataset, and the results show that the average precision (AP) of the trained model is 82.79%, and the frames per second (FPS) is 25.71 f/s. In comparison with the original YOLOv3 model, the detection accuracy of the proposed model is improved by 7.05%, and its speed is improved by 5.29 f/s. Moreover, the proposed model had stronger environmental adaptability and better detection precision and speed than the original model in complex highway scenarios. The experimental results show that the proposed YOLO-Highway model can accurately detect the highway center markings in real-time and has high robustness to changes in different environmental conditions. Therefore, the YOLO-Highway model can meet the real-time requirements of the highway center marking detection.

Study of highway asphalt pavement recycling maintenance scheme decision system and decision method

With modern economic and social development, the technical and economic requirements of highway maintenance and construction projects have become increasingly complicated. Meticulous and in-depth investigation and demonstration guided by scientific theories and methods are of considerable importance to highway maintenance scheme decision. As basis for the selection of highway asphalt pavement recycling maintenance scheme, the factors influencing the decision are analytically demonstrated and an evaluation system is proposed, including three major decision indexes: applicability of recycling mode, recycled pavement quality recovery index, and economic benefit. According to the principles of data statistics and analysis, this study proposes a calculation method for the recycled pavement quality recovery index, analyzes the economic benefits of decision schemes using economic models such as recycling ratio and cost, and puts forward an optimal evaluation method of engineering cost and its fuzzy score intervals. Index weights are calculated through the analytic hierarchy process, and the comprehensive decision evaluation system and comprehensive evaluation method are established. Subsequently, the decision-making method is analyzed on the basis of the decision system by combining the related data. Results show maximum weight of the pavement quality recovery index and minor differences among four recycling schemes in the quality recovery index and applicability. The decision-making results are simplified with clear hierarchical feature because of the fuzzy score intervals of each index. Findings can provide a reference for the asphalt pavement recycling scheme decision.