The maintenance management in the highway context: A system dynamics approach

Being a complex process and a predominant cost component, the maintenance management represents, for the highway context, one of the most critical aspects to take into account for a company concessionaire of the highway service. This is even truer for difficult environments, such as the mountain one, where the particular geographical features requires stricter and more expensive maintenance plans. The paper presents a real case study on the management of the maintenance operations for the A32 highway, which links the city of Turin with France, passing through the mountain range of Alps in the Italian territory. Utilizing a system dynamics (SD) approach enabled by the Powersim software, a model of the particular maintenance system has been created and implemented. Moreover, an optimization of the number of working yards, of the costs related to the total expenses of maintenance with particular regards to the penalties due to a failed respect of the imposed constraints, has been put into place. In order to efficiently manage in real time the complex implemented model, an opportune decision cockpit has been developed and connected to a vast database filled with continuously updated data.