Leveraging maintenance management techniques to evaluate pavement condition index: central Iraq highway system

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the maintenance strategies applied to the Latifiya-Musayib highway section to improve the pavement condition that significantly deteriorated due to military operations during and after the third Gulf War. The functional evaluation measured the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) every five years. The measurement relied on a visual survey of the pavement surface by examining different types of distress that varied in severity. PCI values measured from 2005 to 2015 indicated that the pavement surface could be considered satisfactory according to standard and custom PCI rating scales, while results measured in 2020 indicated that PCI values had declined to a critical stage requiring maintenance. PCI was 63% for the Latifiya-Musayib direction and 65.5% for the opposite direction. Therefore, preventive maintenance was carried out to stop this decline, which improved PCI values by 18.5% and 19.4%, respectively. The pavement performance curve created to evaluate the effectiveness of preventive maintenance showed that the pavement life would be extended by 4 years in the Latifiya-Musayib direction and 9 years in the opposite direction. Finally, measuring the PCI at the end of the assumed pavement's design life is recommended to make the best decision.