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The aim of this thesis is to provide a framework for a decision making system to operate a highway network, to evaluate the impacts of maintenance activities, and to allocate limited budgets and resources in the highway network. This integrated model is composed of a network level traffic flow model (NTFM), a pavement deterioration model, and an optimisation framework. NTFM is applicable for both motorway and urban road networks. It forecasts the traffic flow rates during the day, queue propagation at junctions, and travel delays throughout the network. It uses sub-models associated with different road and junction types which typically comprise the highway. To cope with the two-way traffic flow in the network, an iterative algorithm is utilised to generate the evolution of dependent traffic flows and queues. By introducing a reduced flow rate on links of the network, the effects of strategies employed to carry out roadworks can be mimicked. In addition, a traffic rerouting strategy is proposed to model the driver behaviour, i.e. adjusting original journey plans to reduce journey time when traffic congestion occurs in the road network. A pavement age gain model was chosen as the pavement deterioration model, which is used to evaluate the current pavement condition and predict the rate of pavement deterioration during the planning period. It deploys pavement age gain as the pavement improvement indicator which is simple and easy to apply. Moreover, the deterministic pavement age gain model can be transformed to a probabilistic one, using the normal distribution to describe the stochastic nature of pavement deterioration. A multi-objective and multi-constraint optimisation model was constructed to achieve the best pavement maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) strategy at the network level. The improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is applied to perform system optimisation. Furthermore, the traffic operations on worksites, i.e. lane closure options, start time of the maintenance, and traffic controls, are investigated so as to prevent, or at least to reduce, the congestion that resulted from maintenance and reconstruction works. The case studies indicated that NTFM is capable of identifying the relationship between traffic flows in the network and capturing traffic phenomenon such as queue dynamics. The maintenance cost is reduced significantly using the developed optimisation framework. Also, the cost to the road users is minimised by varying the worksite arrangements. Consequently, the integrated decision making system provides highways agencies with the capability to better manage traffic and pavements in a highway network.

My ethnography begins providing its bibliographical, historical and geographic frameworks along the methodological issues in Chapter I. There, I outline the most explicit phenomena of postsocialism in Gjirokastër city, the introduction of private vehicles and private immobile property and their relationship with the radical transformations of the urban topography. This city today gradually centralises the road infrastructure, reflecting and facilitating the respective postsocialist social centralisation of spatial mobility and the increasing impact of the cross-border network on the social life of the city. The thesis continues in Chapter II with the history of motor-roads in Albania, with particular focus on the relationship between highways and modernisation during socialism and the paradox relationship between society and these infrastructures. During socialism Albanians had to build roads, but they were not able to use them, a process that paved in fact the way for the postsocialist social perceptions of roads and automobility. The main ethnographic and synchronic part begins in Chapter III and continues in Chapters IV and V where I study how the particular cross-border road network is perceived in postsocialist Gjirokastër, while I discuss its social agency after 1990. In Chapter III I focus on the contemporary road mythology in the city and I discuss it in reference other motifs of road mythology that are available in the bibliography. Chapters IV and V are the most important for the argument of the thesis as I emphasise the two most comprehensive road myths of the contemporary socio-cultural condition in Albania and I talk about their relationship with the actual materiality of that infrastructure in reference to the material dimensions of globalisation and transnationalism. In Chapter IV I present the politico-economic asymmetries of postsocialist capitalism in Albania as they are formed dialectically in the material and social constructions of Kakavije-Gjirokastër. In Chapter V, I continue with the dialectical scheme focusing on the social and material articulations of this transnationalism and fluidity from below, with focus on the ontological and material extension of the road: the houses built by migrants. There I show how the super-fluid and asymmetrical global relationships of the postsocialist transition are being familiarised and to a certain degree absorbed within the intimate material entity of the house, via the same road which incorporates and facilitates the international dependency of the society to the migratory process. The last chapter (VI) presents my conclusions emphasising the relationship between anthropology and roads, locating the current ethnography on the wider theoretical discussions on automobility infrastructures, space, time and scale.