In every country, the state of the road infrastructure has always been and will remain an important economic indicator. Return of investments into road repair and maintenance is believed to be two to three times higher than the economic effect of each ruble invested in the construction of new roads. That is why assessing the state of road and transport networks, as well as planning repair works are important issues that have a major economic impact on a district, region or country. In this paper, it is assumed that the task of assessing road conditions has already been completed, and a road defect map containing enough information to formulate an optimization problem already exists. In particular, the article focuses on the problem of pothole patching using the given defect map to design a repair plan ensuring the lowest cost of resources. A combinatorial optimization model aimed at finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects is used as the mathematical model. The informal and formal statements of the problem, formulated as the problem of finding the optimal partition of a set into disjoint subsets under given partition constraints, are described. The author gives a detailed description of an example demonstrating the model capabilities, evaluates the task complexity and outlines directions for further research.