Under the combined effects of climate and traffic, roads deteriorate, slowly at first and then at an accelerated pace once the distresses become visible and significant. At this advanced stage, remedial measures quickly become very expensive as distresses increase. An efficient maintenance management strategy cannot therefore simply rely on a short-term 'visual navigation'. Pavement Management Systems (PMS) have been developed over the past two decades in order to offer road operators a rational and comprehensive alternative. More recently, Asset Management Systems (AMS) have extended this rational approach to encompass road infrastructure management. The latest and most effective systems combine into a single, consistent and deterministic framework the phases of road infrastructure assessment, maintenance programming and strategic analysis. Following a presentation of the main components of such 'Expert Asset Management Systems' (E-AMS), this paper will use one of these components to explore the relationships existing between the maintenance budget, strategy and serviceability of a road network. The present study has been conducted on a full-scale network, located in western France and comprising 2,500 km of roadway.
