Abstract:
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When taking decisions between different options regarding a section of pavement of a highway several approaches can be used. For decades the classical approach was focused strictly in economics. Initially the cost of construction was only considered, but it was finally replaced by the overall cost of construction and exploitation and maintenance, corrected or not by financials factors that try to quantify the effects of distribution of investment along the time. Lately at the end of XX century the environmental approach started to be developed, taking into account several impacts as consumption of energy, water and raw materials, emissions to atmosphere and waste generation, between others. Questions about how to consider impacts on people related to comfort, noise, safety and perceptions among others were also included in what was called the social aspects of sustainability, a new paradigm that integrates these three dimensions (social, environmental, economics). Accordingly a large number of studies have been made in order to compare different solutions of pavements in terms of these dimensions. While in construction and building several standard methods of comparison have been proposed, ranging from scoring to labeling systems, public works and particularly pavements remain as a field where more improvements are expected. A new integrated method of evaluation is therefore being applied to pavements, defining requirements, criteria and indicators that are being treated in order to establish the value function by means of multi-criteria analysis. |