Optimization Model for the Pavement Pothole Repair Problem Considering Consumable Resources

When heavy rain strikes Taiwan, it always results in cracks in road pavement, and damages arising from potholes. Tremendously compromising road safety, road users may have fatal accidents caused by untimely repair actions. The road maintenance department needs to take the responsibilities for road sections in the form of inspections and faces the decision about how to properly allocate available resources to repair pavement damages immediately. When performing pavement repair works, we need to consider the resource consumption behavior and explore the mechanism of replenishing resources and calculating the return time. Therefore, in order to help maintenance units to deal with consumable resource issues, this study proposes a novel approach to offer the mechanism of consumable resource calculation, which is difficult to solve through the traditional vehicle routing problem (VRP) approach. This proposed model treats the pothole repair problem as a resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), which is capable of resolving such consumable resource considerations. The proposed model was developed by adopting constraint programming (CP) techniques. Research results showed that the proposed model is capable of providing the optimal decisions of pavement pothole repair tasks and also meets practical requirements to make appropriate adjustment, and helps the maintenance unit to shorten total repair duration and optimize resource assignment decisions of pavement maintenance objectives.