Advanced Interactive Budget Planning for Highway Management

This paper addresses the optimal distribution of pavement management budget among the sub-agencies of a highway organization. A typical approach by a highway agency in allocating pavement management budget to its sub-units relies on the requests submitted by the latter, and makes adjustments to meet the total budget available by means of certain pre-determined rules or formulas, or some forms of negotiation. This approach is typically subjective in nature and often does not take into consideration the pavement management needs, constraints and objectives rigorously by analytical means. An improved approach is proposed in this paper to optimally allocate the available budget of a highway organization to its agencies by considering the pavement management needs, constraints and objectives of the highway organization and the agencies under its charge. An iterative procedure between the central and sub-level agencies has been developed using genetic algorithms to arrive at an optimal solution for the budget allocation problem.