GUARDRAIL END TERMINAL RATING AND COMPARISON SURVEY

This report evaluates guardrail end terminals for use in the State of Alaska, which has unique winter maintenance concerns. With significant snowfall levels and cold temperatures, Alaska needed to identify an end terminal that can withstand these conditions and be readily repaired while acknowledging the limitations of frozen grounds. The study collects product data from seven different vendors, and eight northern tier state Departments of Transportation. While the study tends to focus on winter repair and replacement, the study collects general information regarding the terminals cost and installation as well as product quality and compatibility. A decision maker is interviewed and multi-attribute value function (MAVF) theory is applied to generate an additive value function for terminal value. During the interview, some threshold values for criteria are established and those alternatives that fail to reach this value are discarded. The alternatives are then rank ordered. The second approach uses linear relationship to rescale each attribute to generate a rank ordering of alternatives, and the third strategy simply combines the attribute ranks for each alternative to establish their rank order. Based on the limited data set a definitive selection of a single alternative is impossible, but recommendations are made.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Pagination: 170 p.

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 00940913
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: FHWA-AK-RD-02-05
  • Files: TRIS, STATEDOT
  • Created Date: Apr 18 2003 12:00AM