For the maintenance management of highly loaded pavements, the road operator must make the decision, where in the network construction zones should be optimally places and which intervention measures and objects should be included. In principle, it is ideal that interventions on a larger stretch of road should be performed simultaneously to reduce the total user disruption in service. At the same time, having a an altered or larger work program increases costs for the road operator. The complexity thus increases requiring an objective comparison of the different alternatives.

The application EMNS is a decision support tool which considers information from the road network subsystems (for example Trassee for road and KUBA for engineering structures) to generate intervention suggestions. Based on these suggestions, EMNS collects possible maintenance projects along a road segment, consisting of multiple objects, and calculates the long-term costs for both road operators and road users. The application software is thus a tool providing an objective comparison of different intervention combinations on a road segment can be calculated and displayed.

The software is developed for the Swiss Federal Road Office (FEDRO). Firstly, a technical concept for the development was written. The EMNS should be categorised as a part of the MISTRA project. The EMNS tool should be available for the road operators, more specifically the maintenance planners in the local offices, and support them in the planning of subsystem-overarching maintenance interventions.

The technical concept envisions a thorough network analysis in the decision-making. Furthermore, the user costs should be considered in every decision. To reach an objective and quantifiable evaluation of the effects of different intervention alternatives. In order to evaluate the effects of the decisions objectively, a traffic flow simulation for each construction zone alternative is performed, to estimate the actual time loss due to the construction zone.

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