4.3.7.4 Applications of the pavement condition data

Pavement condition data is used at all levels of Road Asset Management. Some selected applications of pavement condition data at the strategic, tactical, and operational management levels of road maintenance management are listed below.

Strategic management level:
•    Determining medium and long-term maintenance needs in order to achieve specific quality objectives (measured by pavement condition),
•    Ensuring horizontal (between sub-networks) and vertical (between sub-networks of different road classes) network consistency in the medium and long term, thus ensuring equivalent traffic performance in the overall network of the operators,
•    Analyses of the performance (robustness) of construction technologies and materials based on the monitoring of the evolution of pavement conditions in the respective networks or sub-networks,
•    Identification of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for planning purposes and for the owner's bodies,
•    …

Tactical management level:
•    Allocation of maintenance funds to regional authorities to meet political and socio-economic demands and to achieve the desired level of disparity,
•    Development of the short- and medium-term maintenance programs (localization of the maintenance measures) within the available budget,
•    Controlling of the maintenance programs,
•    …

Operational management level:
•    Identification of the sources of damages,
•    Determination of the appropriate type of measures for the planned maintenance programs,
•    Early detection of unfavorable condition development,
•    …

However, the pavement condition data is also used for numerous other tasks that go far beyond maintenance management. These include, for example, traffic safety analysis, including the calculation of safety potentials and support for safety audits. Geometry data, such as longitudinal slope and curvature, collected over a wide area during the pavement condition monitoring process are used for network-wide traffic engineering and economic analyses. In addition, route images routinely created during condition surveys are used for a variety of tasks, including for inventory purposes.