Technical and economic evaluation of pavement rehabilitation on vehicle fuel consumption costs

Evaluation of Vehicle Operating Costs (VOC) are necessary in pavement management. Vehicle Operating Costs including Fuel consumption costs, accident costs, oil consumption costs, maintenance costs and vehicle depreciation that often paid by road users. Vehicle Fuel consumption costs, is one of the important components of the life cycle costs analysis that it is typically between 20 to 40 percent of the total vehicle operating costs. There are many factors that effect on vehicles fuel consumption. Vehicle type, pavement surface condition, road geometry, vehicle speed and,…effect on vehicle fuel consumption and pavement life cycle costs. Pavement surface condition is one of the factors that effected on vehicle fuel consumption. Pavement roughness, skid resistance and the pavement deterioration are the components of the pavement surface condition. Using of pavement maintenance alternatives at the appropriate time, in addition to improve the pavement surface condition, reduce the vehicle operating costs and vehicle fuel consumptions. The goal of this research is to evaluate the effect of pavement maintenance in a 10 years analysis period on vehicle fuel consumption costs using HDM-4 software. HDM-4 is an application software for pavement management and evaluation of pavement surface condition that has been developed by the world bank. This software needed a serious of input data to analysis. This input data are divided in to four parts, including road networks, vehicle fleets, road works (repair and rehabilitation standards), and HDM-4 Configuring (define standards criteria for each of the variables in the program). For this purpose, effect of pavement maintanence and rehabilitation evaluated in 1170 km of Khozestan province road networks. This rehabilitation alternatives including routine maintenance, single surface dressing, 50 mm overlay, 100 mm overlay and, pavement reconstruction. In this research each rehabilitation approaches was used Separately as a pavement maintenance alternative. In rehabilitation approaches it was supposed that after performed pavement rehabilitation IRI reached to 1.5 m/km. According to HDM-4 ranking this IRI is good. Results of this research showed that, pavement surface conditions effect on vehicle fuel consumption. In other words, improving pavement surface condition cause to reduced vehicle fuel consumption. With applying routine maintenance (crack sealing and patching) there was no change on reducing the vehicle fuel consumption. But, with applying single surface dressing vehicle fuel consumption was reduced during the pavement analysis period. The reduction in vehicle fuel consumption after applying pavement rehabilitation is varies for different type of vehicles. Although the costs of rehabilitation alternatives are more than the cost of routine maintenance, but the economic savings in reduction of vehicle fuel consumption costs are more than the costs of the pavement rehabilitation alternatives in the long terms analysis. According to the result, economic saving from the single surface dressing alternative is more than the other pavement maintenance and rehabilitations alternatives. It was concluded that using rehabilitation in the appropriate time could cause reduction in fuel consumption and resulted in cost saving.