Predicted Pavement Life-Cycle Costing of Surface Maintenance Treatments

Abstract

Some 85% of Australia’s sealed road network is comprised of unbound granular pavements with a wearing surface treatment of stone aggregate embedded in a thin bituminous binder seal. Experimental pavement deterioration data gathered by means of accelerated load testing (ALT) on various forms of binder seal and stone aggregate over separate test pavements was used to estimate relative performance factors for cumulative rutting and roughness deterioration under these surface treatments. The ALT experiments were under controlled environmental conditions that were either continuously wet or continuously dry to allow modification of these relative performance factors for other environmental conditions. These relative performance factors have been applied to the observed deterioration of given surface treatments to develop road network deterioration (RD) models that allow prediction of the influence of various surface treatments on pavement deterioration. This paper demonstrates that when the relative performance factors are applied to the observed pavement deterioration under a given surface treatment to predict pavement deterioration under other forms of surface treatment, selection of a surface treatment option with the lowest pavement life-cycle cost is possible for a given traffic load and environmental condition.