Application of AASHTO PP69-10 & PP70-10 based continuous rutting depth data

Abstract

Monitoring pavement rutting condition is crucial to highway agencies. Rutting depth measures have been extensively referenced for different purposes such as determining pavement present serviceability, modeling pavement deterioration, and so on. Over the decades, various methods have been developed to measure rutting depth; however, two major problems have compromised the reliability and consistency of rutting depth measurement in current practice. First, one measure or discrete rutting depths collected at relatively long intervals have been used to represent the rutting condition of the entire pavement section, which results in imprecise and partial characterization of the actual condition. Second, the rutting depth measures for left and right wheel-path have always been simply averaged for further applications including integrating pavement indices, rutting classification, and so on. Recently, an emerging system called PaveVision3D Ultra is capable of producing 3D 1mm virtual pavement surface model at highway speed for both network and project level survey. In this study, with the bulks of field-collected 3D 1mm transverse profile data, it was found that significant variations of rutting depth exist between left and right wheel-path as well as along the longitudinal direction. Considering these variations, multiple applications of rutting depth data are modeled with suitable analytical methods such as Monte Carlo Simulation to identify the effect of rutting data distribution on Present Serviceability Index (PSI). Suggestions of reasonably utilizing the continuous rutting depth data are proposed for practitioners.