Indiana Pavement Preservation Program

Abstract

State highway agencies are facing immense pressure to maintain roads at acceptable levels amidst the challenging financial and economic situations. In recent years, pavement preservation has been sought as a potential alternative for managing the pavement assets, believing that it would provide a cost-effective solution in maintaining infrastructural conditions and meeting user expectations. This study explores the potential of pavement preservation concepts in managing the agency‘s pavement assets by attempting to integrate pavement preservation considerations within the network-level pavement management system. Several elements are studied in the report: (i) determining triggers for pavement preservation treatments for use in a PMS, (ii) development of performance models for preservation treatments, (iii) developing a remaining service life approach for strategy comparison at the project level, and (iv) developing a pavement preservation framework that integrates the districts and the central office of a state highway agency. It is found that distress-based decision matrices are found to be more desirable as triggers in the pavement management system, primarily because it can be easily adopted for new and innovative pavement preservation materials and treatments. Pavement performance models (both long term pavement performance and short term performance jumps) are developed and incorporated within a pavement management systems used by highway agencies. By adopting a remaining service life approach to evaluate competing pavement strategies at the project level, it is found that pavement preservation can be a cost-effective solution to preserve our pavement assets on a project level. A pavement preservation framework to integrate project and network level evaluations at the districts and network level evaluation at the central office is developed using the remaining service life concept. Using a sample highway network from the state of Indiana, it is found that the proposed framework is capable of improving the remaining service life of the pavement network as compared to the traditional ―worse pavement first‖ concept. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the pavement preservation concept where agencies can look forward to enjoy a much better remaining service life extension to highway pavement assets when compared to the traditional ―worst pavement first‖ approach