Copyright 2005 by International Road Federation APPLICATION OF ADVANCED COMPUTATION ON FLEXIBLE PAVEMENT MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN TAIWAN Jia-Ruey Chang 1 Ching-Tsung Hung 2 Jyh-Dong Lin 3 1 Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, MingHsin University of Science & Technology, No. 1 Hsin-Hsing Road, Hsin-Fong, Hsin-Chu 304, Taiwan. Tel: 886-3-5593142 ext. 3295; Fax: 886-3-5573718; E-mail: jrchang@must.edu.tw 2 Ph.D. student, Department of Civil Engineering, National Central University, Taoyuan, Chungli, 32054, Taiwan. Tel: 886-3-4269270; Fax: 886-3-4227183; Email: 92342008@cc.ncu.edu.tw 3 Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, National Central University, Taoyuan, Chungli, 32054, Taiwan. Tel: 886-3-4220338; Fax: 886-3-4227183; Email: jyhdongl@cc.ncu.edu.tw Keywords: Flexible Pavement, Pavement Maintenance Management System (PMMS), Present Serviceability Index (PSI), Expert System (ES), Fuzzy Analysis, Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), Geographic Information System (GIS), Soft Computation Introduction Pavement management is not a new concept and pavement maintenance can significantly improve pavement’s performance. Authorizations in Taiwan have been faced with decreasing budgets of maintenance and increasing road lengths and transportation needs. For the purpose of improving the efficiency of maintenance and management, several advanced computations were introduced and integrated into Pavement Maintenance Management System (PMMS) in the study. The main objective is to establish a practical and localized network-level PMMS based on Geographic Information System (GIS) for flexible pavement under the consideration of actual situations in Taiwan [1]. Establishment of Present Serviceability Index (PSI) Model The present serviceability on specific pavement sections in Chung-Li Engineering Section of Taiwan Highway Bureau (THB) were collected periodically by THB’s ARAN (Automated Road ANalyzer) and stored to establish an analytical database for sequential tasks. Present Serviceability Index (PSI) was established to determine the quality of pavement. Present serviceability rating (PSR) was surveyed from panel rating, and rutting, roughness, and various distress data were collected by ARAN. Considering the interaction among factors which affect pavement performance, fuzzy integral method was used to establish the non-interactive integrated value [2]. Based on both subjective PSR and objective ARAN data, PSI was developed by fuzzy integral incorporated with fuzzy regression. Because the conventional regression model cannot deal with the fuzzy characteristic existed in PSR, fuzzy regression model was used to establish the PSI relationship between subjective rating (PSR) and objective collection (by ARAN). Fuzzy integral not only eliminates the shortcomings of conventional additive measure, but also improve the accuracy of fuzzy regression. The predictive ability of this PSI model is 93.32% and the critical PSI value is 2.19 [3].