Airport pavement evaluation systems for maintenance strategies development: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Due to the high growth in air transport, combined with the urgency to increase capacity and suitability of the airport infrastructure, the need to adopt more efficient measures in the system arises of pavement management. Aiming to assist researchers in future studies within the theme related to management and initiatives of maintenance on airport pavements, a review of the existing literature was sought regarding the assessment systems and models for pavement conditions. These methodologies are responsible for steering the decision making regarding the actions of treatment and structures rehabilitation. From this, the purpose of this Systematic Review of the literature is to enable the identification of research and relevant contributions, and above all, to serve as a support and database for a greater understanding of the methodologies used in the assessment of airport pavement conditions. Publications were identified on the basis of a structured search strategy, with the selection of 283 papers on the Scopus and Web of Science databases, and after reading the title and abstract, 41 papers were read in full, leading to the implementation of a bibliometric analysis and a qualitative synthesis. It should be noted that among the most important findings and arguments in this article is the use of 15 different methods for prediction of pavement conditions, most of which fall into the category of empirical-mechanistic models. Finally, important considerations are made regarding the limitations and development of future research for decision making in the strategic context of airports pavements maintenance.