2024-08-27
2024-01-04
2023-11-06
Manuscript received August 18, 2023; revised September 22, 2023; accepted October 20, 2023; published January 30, 2024.
Abstract—Road networks are the backbone of transportation infrastructure systems around the world. Thus, it is crucial to maintain the integrity of road networks to facilitate economic and social prosperity. Proper assessment of road pavement conditions is essential to effectively preserve road networks in good condition. The development of adequate condition indices or ranking techniques to evaluate road pavement sections necessitates driving reliable weights for the various road pavement condition criteria. Different objective and subjective weighting approaches are available in the literature. Objective approaches are criticized for failing to adequately consider the varying significance of different criteria, whereas subjective approaches are prone to bias and uncertainty. Hence, this research aims at developing weights by integrating the application of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC), and Monte-Carlo simulation to develop reliable weights for three condition criteria of cracking, rutting, and the International Roughness Index (IRI). Then, Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) is applied to develop a Road Pavement Condition Rating (RCR). Also, six other multi-criteria decision-making techniques (MCDM) are used to rank the road pavement sections according to their condition. The developed techniques are used to assess more than 300 road pavement sections. The comparison between the ranking results of the different MCDM techniques indicates that they are highly correlated.