Over the last few years highway agencies have increasingly tried to coordinate highway interventions in order to reduce both their number and duration, and global maintenance costs. The coordination of these interventions alone, however, is not sufficient to determine optimal groupings of interventions or optimal long term intervention strategies. These tasks are only systematically possible by using appropriate optimisation methods. Since it has only recently become desirable to use optimisation methods in highway agencies, due to the increasing power of computers and increasingly restrained budgets, there is not yet sufficient knowledge with respect to their suitability to specific problems.