KICEM Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management Online ISSN 2233-9582 30 www.jcepm.org http://dx.doi.org/10.6106/JCEPM.2017.3.30.030 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ¹ PhD Candidate, 407 Town Engr., Ames, IA 50011 USA, abdelaty@iastate.edu ² Associate Professor, 404 Town Engr., Ames, IA 50011 USA, djeong@iastate.edu [*Corresponding Author] 3 Associate Professor, 374 Town Engr., Ames, IA 50011 USA, smadi@iastate.edu Practical Approach for Pavement Treatment Decisions for Local Agencies Ahmed Abdelaty 1 , H. David Jeong* 2 and Omar Smadi 3 Abstract: Most local agencies such as counties and small cities continuously express difficulties in making technically and financially defensible decisions on their pavement infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation. Unlike pavement systems managed by state highway agencies, the total lane-miles of many local pavements are significantly short and they are managed by a limited number of staff who typically have multiple responsibilities. Most local agencies also do not have historical pavement performance data and the lack of a systematic decision making framework exacerbates the problem. A structured framework and an easily accessible decision support tool that reflects their local requirements, practices and operational conditions would greatly assist them in making consistent and defensible decisions. This study fills this gap by developing a systematic pavement treatment selection framework and a spreadsheet based tool for local agencies. It is expected that the proposed framework will significantly help local agencies to improve their pavement asset management practices at the project level. Keywords: Pavement maintenance, Local agencies, Pavement management, Project level management, Treatment selection I. INTRODUCTION The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates that $170 billion in capital investment is needed annually to improve the nation's roads infrastructure which are graded with poor grade D [1]. Thus, state highway agencies (SHAs) need to work diligently to smartly manage their pavement assets under strict and constrained funding availability. Local agencies are even facing more challenges since 75% of the nation’s roadways are owned by those agencies [2]. This simple fact drives the need for developing tools and methods that should be specifically designed to meet local agencies’ needs and requirements. However, due to relatively small sizes of pavements managed by local agencies and lack of resources, local pavements have been seriously neglected from the application of optimized pavement treatments over their life cycle. The federal highway administration [2] also points out that local agencies have limited resources and the standards used for assessing the performance of local pavements are different and vary across local agencies, hence, a different management approach is much needed. During the decision making process, local agencies need to have a defensible framework to select the most appropriate treatment for a pavement under consideration. The selected treatment option must be technically feasible, cost effective, and it should offer the highest possible return on investment (ROI) among the feasible group of treatments. Many departments of transportation (DOTs) have developed some matrix-based tools and computerized decision tools to identify feasible treatment options when the pavement conditions are given [3, 4 and 5]. However, these tools fall short of fulfilling the needs and limitation of local agencies. State highway agencies (SHAs) are far advanced in terms of implementing pavement asset management systems when compared to local agencies because of the data collected over the past years, financial resources, and continuous asset management implementations. Additionally, many local agencies are different as most of them do not collect pavement condition data regularly and have limited experience with a limited number of staff. This study aims at developing a practically working approach to pavement treatment decision for local agencies by addressing their critical needs and requirements. The study has been conducted with local agencies in Iowa but the framework and the tool developed in this study can be adapted by any local agency with reasonable adjustments to reflect the agency’s unique business environment and practices. This framework is expected to greatly assist local agencies in enhancing their pavement asset management to achieve the agency’s long term goal of implementing a comprehensive asset management. II. PRIOR STUDIES There are rich domestic publications in the areas of pavement management systems, pavement treatments, decision support models for pavements, pavement deterioration process, and life cycle cost analysis. However, there are few publications on these topics for local agencies. Early in the nineties, researchers recognized the importance of pavement management systems for local governments and small communities. Tavakoli et al. [6] developed a user-friendly pavement management system for small communities that consists of seven modules that cover inventory data, condition data, maintenance and