ITS Friday Seminar - Incorporating Network Considerations into Pavement Management Systems

Seminar | December 7 | 4-5 p.m. | 534 Davis Hall

Speaker/Performer: Aditya Medury, Ph.D. Candidate (CEE), UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Institute of Transportation Studies

The objective of transportation infrastructure management is to provide optimal maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement (MR&R) policies for a system of deteriorating facilities over a planning horizon. While most approaches in the literature have studied the decision-making process as a finite resource allocation problem, the impact of construction activities on the road network is often not accounted for. MR&R activities can cause delays to travelers due to loss in capacity, detours, etc. As a result, there is a need to include these user concerns within the decision-making process.

The state-of-the-art Markov decision process (MDP)-based approaches in infrastructure management, while optimal for solving budget allocation problems, become internally inconsistent upon introducing network constraints. In comparison, approximate dynamic programming (ADP) facilitates solving complex problem formulations by using simulation techniques and lower dimension value function approximations. As part of this work, an ADP framework is proposed, wherein capacity losses due to construction activities are subjected to an agency-defined network capacity threshold. A parametric study is conducted on a stylized network to infer the impact of network-based constraints on the decision-making process. Finally, the performance of the ADP-based approach is compared with another state-of-the-art MDP-based methodology to provide some insights into the applicability of ADP in the context of transportation infrastructure management.

Event Contact: its.fridayseminar@gmail.com