A Multi Objective Decision Making Approach for the Sustainable Maintenance of Roadways
The limited available budget along with old aging infrastructure in nation magnifies the role of strategic decision making for maintenance of highway infrastructure. The challenging objective is to maintain the highway assets in a state of good repair and to improve their efficiency and performance while protecting and enhancing the natural environment. Decision makers are in need of a decision support system to consider these multiple objectives to effectively allocate funding and achieve the construction and maintenance objectives. The proposed model aims at finding optimal techniques for maintenance of multiple roadway asset items while taking into account maintenance time, cost and environmental impacts. This model creates a multi objective problem based on the multi colony ant colony optimization. The objectives of the problem are: (1) Minimizing maintenance costs, (2) Minimizing maintenance time, and (3) Minimizing environmental impacts. The proposed approach will simultaneously optimize three conflicting objectives. The results of implementation of the proposed model on a case study are presented and discussed for a sub set of asset items. The proposed model is validated and results reveal its robustness in generation of optimal solutions. Application of the proposed approach is implemented on the roadway asset items but it is not limited to roadways and is applicable to other infrastructure assets.