SYNOPSIS

The organising committee of the 6th International Conference on Managing Pavements has challenged asset management professionals on how they can accommodate the interests of infrastructure owners, managers, service providers and the wider community of road users within their specific Pavement Management Systems and practices. This paper contains information regarding the background and analysis findings of the AFRICON ICMP6 Challenge Pavement Asset Management Investment Analysis submission. The AFRICON ICMP6 Challenge Pavement Asset Management System (PAMS) is a sophisticated investment decision support system that is capable of undertaking Life Cycle Cost analyses and heuristic optimization in order to determine optimum road maintenance investments. The system is capable of performing these analyses whilst taking into account a Roads Authority’s current or impending budgetary constraints. The sensitivity to various road maintenance policies or funding constraints can be evaluated in terms of their effect on the future road network condition as well as their effect on the broader community (Authority Costs, User Costs). The objective function to be optimized is user defined and by incorporating well defined socio-economic factors into this objective function, it is possible to undertake limited multi-criteria assessments. In terms of the investment decision support framework (Table 2.1) developed by Neil Robertson for PIARC in 2002, the AFRICON ICMP6 Challenge PAMS is fully compliant with the level