Joint optimization of budget allocation and maintenance planning of multi-facility transportation infrastructure systems

Transportation infrastructure, such as pavements and bridges, is critical to a nation’s economy. However, a large number of transportation infrastructure is underperforming and structurally deficient and must be repaired or reconstructed. Maintenance of deteriorating transportation infrastructure often requires multiple types/levels of actions with complex effects. Maintenance management becomes more intriguing when considering facilities at the network level, which represents more challenges on modeling interdependencies among various facilities. This research considers an integrated budget allocation and preventive maintenance optimization problem for multi-facility deteriorating transportation infrastructure systems. We first develop a general integer programming formulation for this problem. In order to solve large-scale problems, we reformulate the problem and decompose it into multiple Markov decision process models. A priority-based two-stage method is developed to find optimal maintenance decisions. Computational studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Our results show that the proposed algorithms are efficient and effective in finding satisfactory maintenance decisions for multi-facility systems. We also investigate the properties of the optimal maintenance decisions and make several important observations, which provide helpful decision guidance for real-world problems.