DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN ROAD MANAGEMENT SYSTEM USING ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS (AHP)

Abstract

For a highway agency, maintenance requirements to all road sections within a given planning period, or to perform all the planned maintenance concurrently, is not possible due to time constrains, budget and other resources such as labor and equipment. This makes a need for PMS and a priority scheme to select and schedule road sections for maintenance treatments according to their maintenance needs. The objective of this study is to use Analytic Hierarchy Process for establishing a priority ranking of rehabilitation and maintenance projects, in a manner that ensures that the overall system meets the required standards and to compare the results obtained using direct assessment method. AHP aims at quantifying relative priorities for a given set of alternatives, on a ratio scale. AHP is advantageous over conventional scoring methods such as, increase in the accuracy and consistency. The weightage factors calculated by AHP reflect the engineering judgement of highway agencies and engineers in prioritising the pavement sections for maintenance in urban area. In the present study, different factors considered are Present Serviceability Rating, Road Class, Riding Quality, Safety Conditions, Traffic Volume, Drainage conditions, Importance to Community and Structural adequacy, as first level. Further subdivisions of each parameter are as level 2. A questionnaire was prepared which included all the level 1 and level 2 parameters. In Direct Assessment method, the experts were asked to rate the importance of each parameter on a scale of 0 to 100 percent whereas in AHP the experts were asked to make a pairwise comparison between the parameters based on Saaty's scale i.e., 1 to 9. Pairwise comparison matrices are then computed using Expert Choice Version 11 software of AHP and weight of each factors were found out after doing checks for consistency of the collected data. Statistical tests are done to check the repeatability of the experiment, to find out any variation in agreement among different groups of experts and a comparison of weightages obtained through AHP and Direct Assessment methods. After applying the needed corrections for experience as per the expert's opinion, the final weight factors for each parameter are estimated. The Priority Index (PI) values can be calculated for the entire urban network for setting the priorities for maintenance. Riding quality was found having the highest weightage after the priority ranking process, followed by structural adequacy, PSR rating, safety condition, traffic volume, importance to community, drainage conditions and road class. As a case study, 21 road sections in NOIDA, U. P. were ranked according to their Priority Index for maintenance using Direct Assessment and AHP.