CONDUCTING A LIFE-CYCLE COST ANALYSIS FOR CHOOSING APAVEMENT TYPE

摘要

The Israeli Public Works Department (IPWD) accompanied the construction of its firstlong-section, inter-urban, concrete road (Route No. 3) with a comprehensive, life-cycle cost analysis(LCCA) in order to compare the life-cycle cost (LCC) of a rigid (concrete) pavement with the LCC of aflexible (asphalt) pavement. This LCCA involved both agency costs (including initial construction costs,routine maintenance costs, rehabilitation costs, and salvage-value cost) and user costs (including vehicleoperating costs, construction-related user-delay costs, and accidents costs). The full data (values andequations) of the LCC calculations are given in the paper. The LCCA indicated that a major factor inshaping outputs was the PSI-deterioration curve, which has a profound influence on the magnitude ofvehicle operating costs. For the assumed PSI-deterioration curve, the LCCA concluded that the initialconstruction costs of the concrete pavement under consideration could be up to 2.2 times, and sometimeseven more, that of the alternative asphalt pavement and that use of the rigid pavement would still meriteconomic justification. This conclusion, however, needed to be validated by verifying the assumed PSIdeteriorationcurve. To this end, the IPWD laid out a full detection program, consisting of (a) a periodicevaluation of the pavement-surface conditions utilizing the PAVER system developed by the U.S. ArmyCorps of Engineers to provide PCI (Pavement Condition Index) scores and (b) a periodic measuring of thesurface roughness with a Road Surface Profiler (RSP) to provide IRI (International Roughness Index)scores.