Causal inference approach to appraise long-term effects of maintenance policy on functional performance of asphalt pavements
This work addresses the challenge of selecting effective maintenance strategies for asphalt pavements, which is crucial for transportation safety and infrastructure quality, though it is incremental in applying causal inference to a specific domain.
The study tackled the problem of evaluating long-term effects of maintenance policies on asphalt pavement performance by proposing a novel causal inference approach, which accurately assessed four preventive maintenance treatments over a 5-year period and determined optimal maintenance times.
Asphalt pavements as the most prevalent transportation infrastructure, are prone to serious traffic safety problems due to functional or structural damage caused by stresses or strains imposed through repeated traffic loads and continuous climatic cycles. The good quality or high serviceability of infrastructure networks is vital to the urbanization and industrial development of nations. In order to maintain good functional pavement performance and extend the service life of asphalt pavements, the long-term performance of pavements under maintenance policies needs to be evaluated and favorable options selected based on the condition of the pavement. A major challenge in evaluating maintenance policies is to produce valid treatments for the outcome assessment under the control of uncertainty of vehicle loads and the disturbance of freeze-thaw cycles in the climatic environment. In this study, a novel causal inference approach combining a classical causal structural model and a potential outcome model framework is proposed to appraise the long-term effects of four preventive maintenance treatments for longitudinal cracking over a 5-year period of upkeep. Three fundamental issues were brought to our attention: 1) detection of causal relationships prior to variables under environmental loading (identification of causal structure); 2) obtaining direct causal effects of treatment on outcomes excluding covariates (identification of causal effects); and 3) sensitivity analysis of causal relationships. The results show that the method can accurately evaluate the effect of preventive maintenance treatments and assess the maintenance time to cater well for the functional performance of different preventive maintenance approaches. This framework could help policymakers to develop appropriate maintenance strategies for pavements.