Chapter

From Reactive to Proactive Maintenance in Road Asset Management

Authors:
  • Roadscanners Oy Finland
  • Independent Researcher
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Abstract

In road asset management, reactive pavement maintenance is still used in most countries. In this policy, corrective measures are only initiated after clear pavement distress or other deficiencies in road condition have been identified. However, in the philosophy of proactive maintenance, the root causes of damages are always determined before making any corrective measures. In addition, any measures chosen, focus on eliminating or reducing the causes of the problems. The central theme of proactive maintenance is to extend the service life of pavement in accordance with the following principles: 1) the avoidance of unnecessary repairs, 2) damage must never become an acceptable “normal,” and 3) approaching damage is monitored and responded to in a timely manner. In Finland, a pilot towards proactive asset management started in 2015, in cooperation between The Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency and Roadscanners. The goal of the pilot was to develop and test new innovative methods to improve the productivity of paved roads maintenance. A further aim was to provide new information on the life cycle costs of various roads and the factors that increase these costs. The results of piloting have been promising. The weakest links increasing asset management costs have been identified and maintenance measures addressing the real root causes of the problems have been implemented. As a result, calculated annual paving costs have been reduced already by 20–40%. In addition, valuable information has been collected of the LCC of different maintenance measures. This information is used when moving towards more proactive maintenance policies.

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... The reactive maintenance approach involves the continuous definition of the maintenance activities as a result of the distress surveys carried out through time; corrective measures are only initiated after clear pavement distress or other deficiencies in road condition have been identified [30]. Instead, preventive maintenance aims to apply a series of low-cost preventive treatments whose main objective is to increase the service life of pavements before reconstruction is needed [31]; the proper timing for the application of the corrective measures can be achieved by predicting the residual service life of the pavement before failure occurs (i.e., bottom-up fatigue cracking). ...
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