Maintenance of airport pavements: the use of visual inspection and IRI in the definition of degradation trends

Abstract

The increasing pressure on air transportation infrastructures and the unpredictability of the weather conditions are factors that accelerate the deterioration of airport pavements, making them more susceptible to unacceptable/dangerous degradation levels. A crucial tool such as a pavement management system is essential to assist managers in the decision-making process of the most adequate preventive and cost-effective solutions to perform maintenance and rehabilitation at the right time and in the right location. These actions needed more than an general structural behaviour analysis to be set, once is many times a functional distress that drives to a sooner maintenance intervention than the one indicated by lack of structural resistance of the pavement. A study on the evolution trends for two parameters that characterise the pavement condition at a functional level (and indirectly also, in part, at a structural level) is presented herein. These parameters are the pavement condition index (PCI) and the international roughness index (IRI). Data from two Portuguese international airports were analysed between 2011 and 2013. The adjusted coefficients of determination for the regression models ranged between 50 and 90% for the PCI and were lower than 15% for the IRI. These results indicate that the regression models obtained for PCI can be used to signalise the need of action on the pavement, whereas it was not possible to identify a useful trend with IRI.