A multi criteria decision analysis technique for including environmental impacts in sustainable infrastructure management business practices

This paper presents a decision analysis technique to allow highway agencies to assess the tradeoffs between costs, condition and energy consumption. It is shown how the entire feasible solution space can be evaluated between multiple stakeholders with differing values to assess the desirability of the outcomes resulting from infrastructure management decisions. Furthermore, an example network-level analysis is presented using data from the Virginia Department of Transportation. The example analysis clearly shows a tradeoff between the most cost effective outcomes (i.e., minimizing the cost divided by the condition) and the outcomes where the energy consumption is minimized, and how decision analysis should account for this tradeoff. The results of the method presented in this paper show that various pavement management alternatives can be represented in terms of desirability, and that this desirability can assist the decision maker with making decisions about performance goals and targets.