An Optimization Framework for Pavement Treatment and Spatio-Temporal Distribution of Work Zone Closures

Departments of transportation (DOTs) are responsible for maintaining the roadway network at certain pavement levels and operational performance. While these two metrics are often looked at separately, we developed a framework in a previous study that integrates pavement and operational considerations and allocates for the interaction between them. This paper expands on the developed framework to zoom in on a work zone allocation module that better represents realistic operations and constraints while making decisions at the network level. The focus of this paper is on the development of a systematic and comprehensive methodology to optimize the allocation of networkwide pavement treatment work zones over space and time. We propose a novel adjacency function that can be used as a surrogate measure for the network travel time obtained from a full-scale simulation run. Our findings confirmed the hypothesis of the strong relationship between the travel time obtained from the developed adjacency function and that obtained using full-scale simulation. The predicted versus actual plot shows a high R squared value of 0.96, which is a good indication for using the adjacency function for computing network travel time in lieu of running full-scale simulation.