Development of representative section selection method for large-scale concrete pavement remodeling project based on trial and error correction approach

Abstract

In this study, a method to identify the representative section (RS) which can represent the pavement conditions of entire aged concrete expressway pavement (CEP) sections for the large-scale remodeling project, was developed based on pavement management system (PMS) data and an optimized approach. To fulfill this objective, various PMS data sets on the target section (TS) of concrete expressway pavement that exceeded 20 years of design life were collected with 100m intervals. Then, the first version of the optimized 100 RSs, which was a reasonable amount of data for analysis of aged CEP condition, was selected based on the different severity levels of surface damage and international roughness index (IRI) data. Secondly, another crucial PMS factor: the alkali-silica reaction (ASR) severity level, was considered and substituted partially in the previously selected 100 RSs to provide additional and reasonable representative characteristics. Finally, the characteristics of the RS were evaluated and verified by considering whether the various distress size rankings of the RS were uniformly distributed within the entire distress size ranking of the total jointed concrete pavement (JCP) and continuously reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP) TS. It was found that the RS selection approach and corresponding criteria proposed in this study, based on the optimization approach, could be successfully used to determine the future large-scale remodeling priority of the old concrete expressway pavements.