| Abstract | An effective highway management system includes multi-dimensional features such as several numbers of facilities, operations and objectives. Therefore, the decision-making process in a highway management system is very complex interrelated with multiple dimensions. Moreover, measurement with non-commensurable units makes the process more difficult and complicated. Although having complexity in its decision-making process, it is present demand and very useful for an effective highway management system so that all objectives and dimensions can be fulfilled as closely as possible. In general, pavements, bridges, roadside elements and traffic control devices are the facilities of highway management system that also includes various objectives such as service, condition, cost, safety, socioeconomic factors, energy etc. In addition, it includes several operations like planning, design, construction, condition evaluation, maintenance, improvement and data management. This study tries to develop a decision-making process for the maintenance operation only that would accumulate all the necessary objectives and their performance indicators in order to have an effective maintenance decision. As the measurement unit of different factors are different and it is very difficult to convert all the units into monitory terms, utility functions of various objectives and their performance indicators are developed that provide a non-dimensional output. Moreover, the influences of different factors are not equal for the maintenance operation. Therefore, weighting factors of all the objectives and their performance indicators are determined so that they can be easily used according to their influences in any decision-making. Finally, the decision-making process that accumulate all the weighting factors and utility functions would help the planners for getting an effective decision for appropriate maintenance operation of different facilities of highway management such as pavement, bridge, roadside elements and traffic control devices |