Strategies for Flexible Pavement Rehabilitation Based on Case-Based Reasoning

Maintenance and rehabilitation strategies are critical components of a pavement management system. The on-time and effective rehabilitation not only improves the pavement performance, but also prolongs the service life of an existing pavement. The process to select feasible rehabilitation alternatives from a pool of available alternatives for pavement rehabilitation can range from using simple judgment to relying on a decision tree based expert system. However, the process of knowledge retrieval in an expert system is tedious and rule revision is not convenient. Therefore, a new technique called Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is used in this paper to reduce the complexity of the problem solving process by relying on solution parameters that were successfully applied in the previous similar problems. The solution parameters are contained in an active case base that is continually updated with new solution parameters when new problems are solved. In this paper, a CBR system is proposed for determining pavement rehabilitation strategies by comparing the similarity between available solutions and new solutions.