Abstract
Pavement construction is one of the most costly parts of transportation infrastructures. Incommensurate design and construction of pavements, in addition to the loss of the initial investment, would impose indirect costs to the road users and reduce road safety. This paper aims to propose an optimization model to determine the optimal configuration as well as the optimum thickness of different pavement layers based on the Iran Highway Asphalt Paving Code Number 234 (IHAP Code 234). After developing the optimization model, the optimum thickness of pavement layers for secondary rural roads, major rural roads, and freeways was determined based on the recommended prices in “Basic Price List for Road, Runway and Railway” of Iran in 2015 and several charts were developed to determine the optimum thickness of pavement layers including asphalt concrete, granular base, and granular subbase with respect to road classification, design traffic, and resilient modulus of subgrade. Design charts confirm that in the current situation (material prices in 2015), application of asphalt treated layer in pavement structure is not cost effective. Also it was shown that, with increasing the strength of subgrade soil, the subbase layer may be removed from the optimum structure of pavement.
Highlights
Surface transportation is the most widely used mode of transportation, and pavements are an essential part of roads, streets, and parking lots in all over the world
With increasing the strength of subgrade soil, the granular subbase layer may be removed from the optimum structure of pavement
In this paper an optimization model was proposed to determine the optimal configuration as well as the optimum thickness of each layer of pavement structure based on the Iran Highway Asphalt Paving Code 234
Summary
Surface transportation is the most widely used mode of transportation, and pavements are an essential part of roads, streets, and parking lots in all over the world. Nicholls presented an optimization program supplement to the DNPS86 pavement design computer program to produce a minimumcost combination of pavement layer thicknesses This method enables the obtaining of the least cost design for flexible and rigid pavements without manual iteration [17]. Abaza and Abu-Eisheh represented an optimum approach for the design of flexible pavements based on AASHTO method which utilized the anticipated performance of pavement and its life-cycle cost. The proposed model considered the fatigue damage caused on the asphalt surface and the degradation of granular materials caused by repetitive loading cycles They showed that the reliability based design optimization combined with a long-term maintenance policy of pavements produces appropriate integral designs. An optimization model was proposed to determine the optimum structure of pavement as well as the thickness of each layer, based on minimizing the initial construction cost of pavement. Optimization problem was modeled as an integer programming model
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