Abstract
The latest advancements in road asphalt materials and construction technologies have increased the difficulty for engineers to select the appropriate pavement design solution with consideration of proper timing for maintenance planning. On the other hand, Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools allow practitioners to efficiently store and manage large amounts of data, supporting decision making in road asphalt pavement design and management. The present work focused on the elaboration of a BIM-based maintenance analysis tool for the specific evaluation of several condition indicators and the selection of proper maintenance solutions designed to include alternative materials and advanced recycling technologies. A traditional BIM workflow was integrated with additional user-defined property sets to investigate the need for maintenance at the present date and predict the degradation curve of the condition indicators through the least square interpolation of time series of data. The analysis tool also provided the selection of available pavement alternatives from a library of designed solutions based on their compliance with project-specific constraints (maximum budget, minimum useful life, and availability of secondary raw materials and in-place recycling technologies). The proposed BIM tool aims to be a practical and dynamic way to integrate maintenance planning considerations into road pavement design, encouraging the use of digital tools in the road industry and ultimately supporting a pavement maintenance decision-making process oriented towards a circular economy.
Highlights
It is known that the road transport system plays a fundamental and strategic role in the economic and social development of a country [1]
Acquisition of information related to the road geometry and the mechanical characteristics of the materials making up the layers of the asphalt pavement; modeling of the road pavement in a Building Information Modeling (BIM) environment; implementation of a decision support system for the management of maintenance processes
The first road section was 460 m long, the second one 500 m long and the third one 800 m long; Traffic data: the first road section had an average daily traffic (ADT) of 20,099 vehicles with 7% heavy vehicles, the second one an ADT equal to 5000 vehicles and 3% heavy vehicles, and the third an ADT of 15,000 vehicles with 6% heavy vehicles; Pavement configuration in terms of thicknesses of the asphalt layers on site, which were read from the available documentation of the pavement construction works; Characteristics of the subgrade, which was classified as A2-5 soil according to EN 13242; Mechanical and volumetric characteristics of the asphalt mixtures, which were known from the special tender requirements of the road works
Summary
It is known that the road transport system plays a fundamental and strategic role in the economic and social development of a country [1]. The implementation of a pavement management system requires the definition of appropriate maintenance criteria and condition indicators, monitoring of the state of the road pavement, and archiving and processing of data, in order to plan and schedule maintenance interventions [3,4]. A support system for the optimum management of all this information is elaborated, which is associated with both the mechanical characteristics that make up the layers of the pavement and the global condition of the pavement, with specific focus on the management of maintenance interventions by reusing secondary resources in the asphalt mixtures for road pavements. The proposed methodology mainly consists of three phases: acquisition of information related to the road geometry and the mechanical characteristics of the materials making up the layers of the asphalt pavement; modeling of the road pavement in a BIM environment; implementation of a decision support system for the management of maintenance processes. The code has been divided into two different blocks, through which the following results were pursued: assessment of the road condition in terms of evaluation of the degradation curve of selected condition indicators and timing of the required maintenance interventions; evaluation of the compatibility of a library of designed pavement solutions involving secondary raw materials and cold recycling technologies with external imposed constraints
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