A hybrid fuzzy multi-attribute decision making model to select road pavement type.

Pavement is an important part of a road structure. Selection of road pavement type is one of the important challenges of decision making by highway administrators. The life-cycle cost analysis is one of the common tools to select the pavement type which considers economic criteria such as costs of construction, maintenance and rehabilitation, and user costs; however, noneconomic criteria are neglected. The inadequate selection of road pavement type tends to increase the pavement life-cycle cost and impacts both environmental and social parameters. In this study, a three-step hybrid model is proposed to solve this problem. Initially, the causal relationships of main criteria affecting the pavement type selection are determined using decision making trial and evaluation laboratory. Then, the weight and importance of criteria and sub-criteria are determined using fuzzy analytic network process. Finally, the ranking of pavement alternatives is carried out using a fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution. A real case study consisting of five different types of pavements including hot mix asphalt, stone mastic asphalt, jointed plain concrete pavement, roller compacted concrete pavement with hot mix asphalt overlay and continuous reinforced concrete pavement is used to show the validity of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]