Sustainability index for highway construction projects

Abstract

The focus of this research is to develop a sustainability index for Egyptian highways construction projects that assist highways engineers, mangers and highways agencies to develop sustainable design, construction, operation and maintenance processes for highways. It acts as a sustainable measurement tool for highways construction and maintenance practices to determine the achieved performance of sustainability in the highways construction projects represented by an index. This index reflexes the implementation amount of sustainable choices used throw the highways construction process and even more in the maintenance process. A review on recent studies and available tools on highways sustainability covered to develop appropriate parameters for the indexing model and avoidance of non-compatible parameters with the Egyptian highways nature then performing questionnaire on these model parameters to obtain optimum sustainable choices. In order to get reliable results correlation and reliability analysis performed on the data then extracting the most effective parameters according to Pareto concept then making pairwise comparison questionnaire serving AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) requirements to obtain the weights of each parameter in the model. A scorecard for the indexing model developed to get rating system. Case studies presented to demonstrate the use of the sustainability index for Egyptian highways construction projects. Keywords: Sustainability, Highways, Index, Sustainability index, Evaluation model, Analytical hierarchy process, Rating system