Modelling stochastic degradation and maintenance effects for the road network of Amsterdam: a multi-attribute data-driven approach

Data-driven prediction of infrastructure aging is challenging due to the complex stochastic nature of degradation effects and the ill-documented historical records.Degradation modeling is, however, crucial for predictive maintenance that is key for infrastructure integrity.This study presents a multi-attribute, data-driven approach for modelling stochastic degradation and maintenance effects of roads, mining an extensive database of geo-located historical inspection and maintenance records from the municipality of Amsterdam.Inspection data track pavement conditions at irregular intervals across ten discrete states per road segment, following the Dutch CROW 146 protocol.Damage severity and extent for eight damage modes is captured, i.e., for transverse unevenness, irregularities, ravelling, edge damage, crack formation, joint filling, joint width, and settling.The maintenance dataset includes >25k minor interventions across 17k road segments, indicating repair requirements, and 200+ major maintenance projects, covering 21k segments where interventions are planned, all without verifying completion.This complicates accurate modelling of natural degradation as it is confounded by maintenance effects.To address the issue of irregular inspections, degradation is first modelled as a continuous-time Markov chain.Thereby, transition rates are estimated, which are then converted to discrete-time Markov chain transition probability matrices to eventually support regular maintenance planning.We further learn the effects of minor and major maintenance activities, as defined and recorded in the database.Based on the estimated degradation transitions, pre-maintenance and post-maintenance state distributions are estimated.Instantaneous maintenance transition matrices are computed by minimizing the cross-entropy between the pre-maintenance state after the intervention and the post-maintenance state.The model allows for a multi-attribute approach, segmenting roads based on construction material (e.g., asphalt, tiled pavement) and traffic loads (e.g., residential, commercial/pedestrian).The approach is exemplified for tiled pavements for a section of the road network of Amsterdam, where the effects of minor and major maintenance are ablated for long-term predictions.Although applied to Amsterdam, this method is relevant to any infrastructure system with discrete state datasets, providing a foundation for data-driven decision-making in infrastructure management.