Potential application of Bayesian influence diagram in a pavement management system

A major objective of a pavement management system (PMS) is to assist highway managers in making consistent and cost-effective decisions related to maintenance and rehabilitation of pavements. Decision making in PMS involves uncertainties, subjective judgements, and risks. The author presents key ideas of Bayesian influence diagrams, and develops, with the use of an influence, a probabilistic model to analyze uncertainties and subjective judgement in PMS decision-making. The value of information concept is used to examine the risk tolerance. The Bayesian influence diagram is a representation of a belief network with uncertainty. The nodes in the diagram represents uncertain and decision variables, and the arcs indicate probabilities dependence. The essential concept underlying the influence diagram is the representation of variables critical to the problem under consideration, and their inter-relationship in a graph-theoretic manner