Using Machine Learning for Road Maintenance Cost Estimates in Brazil: a case study in the Federal District

Application of Machine Learning Techniques to Predict a Patient’s No-Show in the Healthcare Sector

“…In the past decades, an increase in its research interest led to more and more areas of science finding application within ML algorithms. Application can be found in agriculture [8], industry [9], sensor networks [10], fashion [11,12] or healthcare [13,14], just to mention a few examples.…”

Estimated Maintenance Costs of Brazilian Highways Using Machine Learning Algorithms

“…Road concessions have great autonomy and resources available to make the necessary investments. These scenarios, quite opposite to those of public authorities which face severe budgetary constraints, must comply with the legal criteria for hiring specialized companies to perform the services of road maintenance and conservation (Gaussmann et al, 2020;Pivatto et al, 2017). In order to regulate the legal criteria for public procurement in Brazil, Law 8,666 was sanctioned in 1993, which establishes that the procurement and acquisition of goods and services in the public sector must be carried out through the elaboration of a detailed budget of the desired object, and based on the reference price table adopted by the agency, the overall value of the acquisition or contracting is obtained (Pivatto et al, 2017).…”

“…Within this context, the Department of Highways of the Brazilian Federal District implemented in 2016 a computer system called Road Maintenance and Conservation Management System to control and plan the maintenance and conservation activities of highways (Gaussmann et al, 2020).…”

“…The Road Maintenance and Conservation Management System aims to maintain an updated register of road elements, to qualify the state of conservation of each road segment and its elements, to provide subsidies for the quantification of services and resource needs for conservation and budget proposals; the system provides planning and management of services and ensures the control of services performed (Martin, 2018). To estimate road maintenance costs the Road Maintenance and Conservation Management System uses "effort-based calculation" to answer how much conservation should be performed (Gaussmann et al, 2020).…”

“…Thus, for example, for manual weeding of an unpaved shoulder, an effort level of 0.5, 1.0, or 2.0 could be defined for each square meter of unpaved shoulder, which is equivalent to weeding once every two years, once a year or twice a year respectively by applying the three exemplified rates. It is also evident, on the other hand, that the higher the level of effort applied, the higher the level of quality achieved (Gaussmann et al, 2020).…”