2008 - Bangladesh - Optimal Pavement Standards Using HDM-4

Roads and Highways Department (RHD) of Bangladesh does not have appropriate maintenance standards to maintain the road network efficiently. Therefore, a study was conducted to improve some important aspects of Pavement Management System (PMS) in Bangladesh, which dealt with analysis of road database of RHD for reliability, development of treatment intervention criteria and optimum maintenance standards using the Highway Development and Management (HDM-4) model. This paper discusses deriving optimum pavement maintenance standards using the HDM-4. All the road maintenance treatments used in Bangladesh were considered to
determine optimum intervention levels for each treatment using different sections optimisation technique. The study divided the whole RHD road network into 48 groups of road based on surface type, traffic volume and pavement width to determine the optimum maintenance standard for each road group. It was observed that the derived optimum maintenance standards could be used for future decision-making purposes, as they were within the zones of optimum maintenance standards. Detail examples in deriving optimum pavement maintenance standards were given in this paper.