Development of Pavement Maintenance Management System PMMS for Urban Roads

Abstract

Roads are the fundamental infrastructure requirement for the development of a nation, contributing to the National economy. The availability of good and serviceable roads is as important in an urban area as other services like water supply, electricity, drainage, telecommunication etc. Any shortfall in the serviceability of urban roads immediately results into great dissatisfaction among the commuter and the urban population. Regular Maintenance of these city roads is very much essential and should not be neglected, particularly in developing countries like India. The magnitude of work involved in maintaining the road networks to required serviceability is very large but the budget available for the maintenance is generally not enough to meet the requirements. Most of the maintenance and rehabilitation treatments provided on the urban roads is based upon the experience or judgment of the department engineers only. Therefore, there is a need of develop an effective scientific methodology and programs for deciding the optimum maintenance and rehabilitation strategies for the city road networks. Development of an effective Pavement Maintenance Management System (PMMS) would provide various project and programme level analysis and will also help to calculate the remaining service life of pavements and to prioritize the urban road sections based upon the available maintenance funds. Rawat (1998) and Shah (2016) stated that the urban roads in India have different types of problems as compared to other categories of road such as higher repetitions of traffic with problem of overloading, encroachment on the road side area, lack of proper drainage system which may lead various distresses in pavements, and various utility services which necessitate frequent digging thereby disturbing homogeneity of pavement structure.