A PROCEDURE TO DETERMINE CRITICAL PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE TIMING

The main objective of this paper is to present a procedure to quantify the economical effect of deferring pavement preventive maintenance on maintenance costs. The development and application of the procedure is based on data collected from the road network of the Riyadh area, Saudi Arabia. The core of this procedure is the development of a set of models that relate pavement maintenance costs to pavement condition. The results showed that, on the average, the annual maintenance costs (based on a life cycle cost analysis) of pavements with poor condition would be as much as four times the costs if pavements were maintained while they are in good condition (time for preventive maintenance). The study also identified the critical time "age", for different pavement types, after which the required maintenance cost increases at a very rapid rate.