Quantifying Overall Performance of Highway Design, Construction, and M&R Practices Using ECC & ASL

Developing a method that quantitatively evaluates and compares the overall performance from economic (agency) and user service perspectives of the highways constructed with different designs, different construction practices, in different places with different environments, and under different traffic conditions with different Maintenance and Rehabilitation (M&R) histories, has been challenging. The factors (costs, effectiveness and traffic volume) are studied in this paper and then an economic and user service-based performance measure method is proposed to identify high or low pavement overall performance. The two indicators, Equivalent Comprehensive Cost (ECC) and an Average Service Level (ASL), in this method are proposed to evaluate the unit agency costs and average service level over the analysis period of the project quantitatively. Two different pavement projects were generated with hypothetical data to illustrate the ability of the proposed method to compare the overall performance of different projects, and a sensitivity analysis of the discount rate was also studied and discussed. Future research is recommended.