Maintenance Budget Planning:

A Case Study for Rigid Pavement Maintenance System in Thailand

Suthathip Suanmali1 and Veeris Ammarapala2
Transportation Research Center
Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology
Thammasat University, Pathumthani 12000, THAILAND
1
(ssuanma@gmail.com) 2(veeris@siit.tu.ac.th)

ABSTRACT
The expansion of rigid pavement network under the responsibility of the Department of Rural Roads (DORR) has driven
DORR to initiate the development of Rigid Pavement Maintenance System (RPMS). The developed system is aimed to
analyze concrete or rigid pavement conditions, select the most appropriate treatment technique, and prioritize importance
of the maintenance to be performed on different road sections in order to optimize the DORR’s limited maintenance
budgets. The system consists of two modules: Pavement Condition Index (PCI) Module and Optimization Module.
Deterioration data, obtained from the visual roads survey of pavement conditions, are collected and analyzed using the
PCI Module. The Optimization Module allows the DORR to effectively arrange the maintenance for all concrete
pavement sections. In addition, the rigid pavement performance criteria and the maintenance budget planning are
discussed in this paper.

Keywords: Deterioration model, Distress, Markov chain, Pavement Condition Index, Rigid Pavement Maintenance
System.
1. INTRODUCTION
In Thailand, the five major transport modes are road, rail
way, waterway, sea, and air transports. Among all of
them, road transport is considered to be the most
important one. Due to the excessive usages and heavy
load repetitions, several damages on the concrete roads
such as the increase of surface roughness, cracks,
potholes, divided slap, punch out, and spalling occurred.
The Department of Rural Roads, Ministry of Transport, is
one of the main government organizations responsible for
highways development and management in Thailand
both in urban and rural areas. Their objective is to
provide good serviceability and convenient road
networks to Thai people. Other than improving the
infrastructure of the country’s logistics systems, the
DORR has been trying to maximize the efficiencies of
road and bridge networks in order to promote Thailand
tourisms. With better road and bridge networks, DORR
believes that visitors could gain access to many of
Thailand’s hidden attractions without much difficulty.
In terms of budgeting, the DORR receives a certain
amount of annual budget to operate routine maintenance
on roads and their assets along the roads. Those tasks are
such: small deterioration fixing on road surfaces;
shoulder maintenance; sidewalk maintenance; connection
road, median; and drainage system and bridge
maintenance. Like other government organizations,
normally, the budgets that DORR received do not match
with the budgets requested. Therefore, DORR has to
come up with an effective way to utilize their limited and
inadequate maintenance budget. Nevertheless, because of
the complicated nature of concrete or rigid pavement
road, the solid guidelines to help DORR manage the
maintenance budget effectively has not yet existed [1].
Currently, the number of concrete roads under the
responsibility of the DORR has been constantly
increasing. There is a total of 45,462.523 kilometers (km)
of roads in the DORR’s roadway network, about 866 km
of which are concrete pavements. The existing
maintenance management system, extended from the
maintenance system of asphaltic roads, faces several
problems such as
• The deterioration of concrete roads is much
more complicated than asphalt structures; it is
much more difficult to identify the true causes
of deteriorations.
• The evaluation of concrete roads by the old
system does not reflect the actual behavior of
the roads. It considers only damages, but it does
not take the condition and strength of the service
roads into account.
Therefore, the development of Rigid Pavement
Maintenance System (RPMS) is initiated; it is aimed to
analyze concrete or rigid pavement conditions, select the
most appropriate treatment technique, and prioritize the

978-1-4244-6487-6/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE

importance of different road sections in order to optimize
the DORR limited maintenance budgets.
2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RIGID PAVEMENT
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (RPMS)
The development begins with the study of the existing
maintenance system implemented by DORR to identify
any problems and types of deteriorations on rigid
pavement [2]. Also, the maintenance systems from other
highways management organizations are analyzed to
determine their strengths and weaknesses. The collected
information is contributed to the development of the
RPMS.
After all basic information about the system can be
gathered, the rigid pavement performance criteria are
developed. From these criteria, the new visual inspection
forms can be constructed. These forms assist the DORR
personnel to effectively collect the deterioration data.
With these forms, all the collected data can be processed
and analyzed accurately.
After the collected data has been cleaned, it is transferred
to in the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) Module. Then,
the PCI value of each surveyed section can be calculated.
This PCI value is a key indicator used to indicate the
condition of each concrete road section. Its total score of
one-hundred means that the specific section of road has
an excellent serviceability level. The lower PCI value
represents a poorer rigid pavement condition and
suggests that the maintenance should be performed
accordingly. Therefore, with the concept of PCI values,
the maintenance and budget planning for rigid pavement
can be accomplished more effectively.
In addition to visual inspection, instrumental inspections
can also be performed in order to inspect structural
damage and identify the quality of the roads. Such
instrumental inspections are benkelman beam, bump
integrator, falling weight deflectometer, automated road
monitoring, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and etc.
3. DETERIORATIONS CLASSIFICATION
The deteriorations of concrete roads could result from
several causes such as traffic volume, changes in
underground structure and changes in temperatures and
humidity.
For normal deteriorations that are shown on the concrete
surface, the standard visual inspection can identify the
type of damages and severities.
Normally, the damage can be measured by its physical
attributes such as length of damage (meters), width of
damage (millimeters), or area of damage (square meters).
For some type of deteriorations, the inspector also has to
record level of severity. In general, the severity can be
divided into three levels:
• Low (L): Roads are in good condition and can
be operated normally.
• Medium (M): Damages and deteriorations
appear on the surface, but the road can still be
operated normally. Yet, the maintenance is
required to prevent future damage.
• High (H): Roads are severely damaged and
the immediate measures are required.
According to the Federal Highway Administration 2003
[3], the damages of concrete pavement can be classified
into 21 categories, as can be shown in table 1.
3.1 An Example of Rigid Pavement Deteriorations: A
Corner Crack
Corner crack is a crack appears along a diagonal corner
of the concrete surface, as shown in figure 1. The levels
of a corner crack are as described in table 2.
Length of a
corner crack
Figure 1: An Example of a Corner Crack
Measured in Meters
 Table 1: Classification of Damages on Rigid Pavement and Their Symbolic Representations

Types of Types of Types of

Code Symbol Code Symbol Code Symbol
Damages Damages Damages

Longitudinal Durability Blow-up or

1 8 15
Crack “D” Crack Buckling

Joint Load
Transverse
Transfer
2 and Diagonal 9 16 Pumping
System
Crack
Deterioration

Concrete
Joint Seal
3 Corner Crack 10 17 Pavement
Damage
Patching

4 Divided Slab 11 Corner Spall 18 Pop-out

Transverse
Map Joint Spall,
5 Cracking or 12 Longitudinal 19 Faulting
Crazing Joint Spall or
Crack Spall
Lane to
Shrinkage
6 13 Scaling 20 Shoulder
Crack
Drop off

Lane to
Polished
7 Punch-out 14 21 Shoulder
Aggregate
Separation

Table 2: The Three Levels of Corner Crack

Level Description
A corner crack with a width of 3 mm. or less, or a spalling with a width of 6
Low (L)
mm. or less. No visible faulting occurred.
A corner crack with a width of more than 3 mm. but no more than 6 mm or a
Medium (M) spalling with a width of more than 6 mm. but no more than 50 mm. It has to
combine with a visible faulting with a width of 6 mm. or less.
A corner crack with a width more than 6 mm. or a spalling with a width
High (H) more than 50 mm. It has to combine with a visible faulting with a width
more than 6 mm.

3.2 An Example of a Visual Inspection Form types of deteriorations are found in the particular sub-
section. They are:
In this study, the visual inspections are performed on five
concrete road sections with the total of 41.1 kilometers. • Type 2: Transverse and diagonal crack
The road sections surveyed are further divided into a sub- • Type 3: Corner crack
section, each with 25 meters long. Hence, in total, there • Type 5: Map cracking
are 1,646 surveyed sub-sections. An example of a filled • Type 9: Joint load transfer system deterioration
visual inspection form is demonstrated in figure 2. Five • Type 13: Scaling
 3 2

9
13

Figure 2: An Example of a Visual Inspection Form

4. PAVEMENT CONDITION INDEX (PCI) 5. MAINTENANCE SYSTEM

Pavement Condition Index or PCI is a numerical index Typical concrete roads are durable, strong and able to
that was first developed by the United States Army Corps handle high volume traffics. The concrete maintenance
of Engineers (USACE) and its value is based on a visual and repair methods depend on the following factors:
survey of the pavement conditions [4]. A numerical value
ranges between 0 and 100 defines the condition of a • number of years a concrete road is in service,
roadway, with a value of 100 representing an excellent • PCI and International Roughness Index (IRI)
pavement condition. values,
• faulting,
The results from the survey of 1,646 sub-sections are • the proportion of deteriorated surface area,
employed in the calculation of the PCI. Then, a summary • and the proportion of deteriorated joint
of the calculated PCI for all sections are as summarized in sealing.
table 3.
5.1 Maintenance Budget Planning
Table 3: Summary of Calculated PCI
PCI Frequency With limited budget and resources, the DORR has to
0 ≤ x ≤ 40 determine how to appropriately allocate maintenance
44
budget to get most effective results on concrete roads. At
40 < x ≤ 45 34 this point, the objective of the budget planning is to
45 < x ≤ 50 27 determine which sections of the concrete pavement
50 < x ≤ 55 48 should be repaired, when and how to repair them within
55 < x ≤ 60 59 the limited budget.
60 < x ≤ 65 51
The maintenance budget planning model can be divided
65 < x ≤ 70 61 into two categories. The first budgeting model is aimed to
70 < x ≤ 75 67 minimize the budget while maintaining the PCI value of
75 < x ≤ 80 74 the entire roads network at the targeted level indicated by
80 < x ≤ 85 53
the DORR. This model can be described by the equations
below:
85 < x ≤ 90 73 n
90 < x ≤ 95 69 min ¦c δ i i (1)
95 < x ≤ 100 986 i =1
with subject to
 n on a year-to-year basis. Because of insufficient
¦ PCI
i =1
i information about the deterioration rate of the rigid
>T (2)
n the long-term budgeting strategy cannot be determined by
where, 1 ≤ i ≤ n and
n = the total number of sub-sections
ci = repair cost of sub-section i
­1 if sub - section i is repaired
δi = ®
¯0 otherwise
The second model is intended to maximize the change in
PCI values of the entire concrete road network under the
limited budget. The following equations describe this
model:
n
¦ ΔPCI δ
max i i (3)
i =1
with subject to
n
¦c δ
i =1
i i ≤B (4)
where, B is the amount of maintenance budget.
The aforementioned models allowed the DORR to
effectively utilize their inadequate resource and prioritize
the importance of different road sections while
maintaining the targeted PCI of the entire road network.
However, because of the limited information about the
concrete pavement deterioration rate and limited time of
the project, the capability of the models is still limited. Its
shortcoming stems on the fact that it cannot be applied to
cover the situation about what will happen if a specific
road section is not maintained in a one year time.
Therefore, when using this model, the DORR cannot plan
their budget for a period longer than one year.
In any events, the DORR has been implementing this
system and to assist them in prioritizing the maintenance
projects and conducting a more effective budgeting
strategy.
6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The Rigid Pavement Maintenance System has the ability
to analyze concrete or rigid pavement conditions based on
both PCI and IRI values, select the most appropriate
treatment technique, and prioritize the importance of
different road sections in order to optimize the DORR
limited maintenance budgets. In addition, the system is
easy to use and is currently used by the DORR.
However, the RPMS has a limitation that it can only
manage and prioritize the maintenance work for DORR
pavements and insufficient time to conduct this research,
using the RPMS.
The authors propose to improve the PRMS in the
subsequent project by collecting additional data from
visual inspections of the same roads sections. Then, the
concept of Markov Chain and Stochastic Process [5, 6]
may be applied to forecast the PCI and IRI values in order
to obtain a long-term budgeting strategy.
Furthermore, it has been criticized by inspectors that the
21 categories of deteriorations seem to be too many and
too much time-consuming to collect, visually. Therefore,
the authors propose that the visual inspection form and its
criteria may be carefully modified and regrouped to be
more practical. The new classifications will correspond to
the damages on the concrete surfaces founded in
Thailand, with hope that the new system can produce
about the same quality of results.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors acknowledge the Department of Rural Roads,
Ministry of Transports, Thailand, for their kind
cooperation. The corresponding author acknowledges
Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology (SIIT)
for financial support to attend this conference. This
research is supported under Transportation Research
Center (TReC), SIIT, Thammasat University. The authors
would like to acknowledge the funding.
The contents of this paper reflect the views of the authors
who are solely responsible for the accuracy of the facts,
analyses, conclusions, and recommendations represented
herein, and do not necessary reflect the official view or
policy of any organizations aforementioned.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Ammarapala, V. and Vananuvethapong, S. (2009) The
Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process on Highways
Maintenance Budgeting, Proceedings of the 5th
International Conference on Information and
Management Sciences, Kunming, China, Page numbers.
[2] Bureau of Materials Analysis and Inspection and
Bureau of Highways Maintenance Management (2005).
Road Maintenance Manual. Department of Highways,
Thailand.
[3] Federal Highways Administration (2003). Distress
Identification Manual for the Long-term Pavement
Performance Program. US Department of Transportation.
[4] Shahin, M. Y. (2005). Pavement Management for
Airports, Roads and Parking Lots. Springer.
[5] Langville, A. N. and Meyer, C. D. (2005). A Survey
of Eigenvector Methods of Web Information
Retrieval. The SIAM Review, 47(1):135-161.
[6] Meyer, C. D. (2000). Matrix Analysis and Applied
Linear Algebra. SIAM, Philadelphia.

9. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Suthathip Suanmali, Ph.D. received her Ph.D. in

Mathematics from North Carolina State University in
2007. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of School
of Management Technology at Sirindhorn International
Institute of Technology (SIIT), Thammasat University.
Her research interests lie in the area of applied linear
algebra, input-output model and supply chain
management.

Veeris Ammarapala, Ph.D. received his B.Eng. in

Industrial Engineering from SIIT, Thammasat University,
Thailand; M.S. in Operations Research from Columbia
University, USA; and Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems
Engineering from Rutgers, the State University of New
Jersey. He is currently an Assistant Professor of the
School of Management Technology, and is the Head of
Transportation Research Center (TReC) at SIIT,
Thammasat University. His research interests are in
decision support systems, risk management, economic
analysis, and supply chain management.