A Decision Support System for Road Maintenance Budget Allocation

The road transport system is a large and complex system and the allocation of resources to different maintenance activities requires an effective maintenance strategy based on a long-term perspective. This paper presents a simulation model based on System Dynamics methodology that can be used as a decision support system to effectively allocate road maintenance funds. The System Dynamics model is constructed in the Powersim modeling environment and it consists of four main module or sub-systems: 1) Financial sub-system, 2) Physical sub-system, 3) Functional sub-system, and 4) Evaluation sub-system. The model has been tested for several different maintenance policies. The behavior of the system was studied for several combinations of budget allocation that were used in the simulation experiments.