Wander 2D: a flexible pavement design framework for autonomous and connected trucks

Abstract

ABSTRACT The lateral position of truck loading is a random phenomenon for human-driven trucks because they do not follow a straight path as they travel. Therefore, this variable has been called as wheel wandering in the pavement design community and has been considered in an implicit way. However, with the introduction of autonomous and connect trucks (ACTs), this variable is expected to be controllable using the embedded auto-pilot and communication technologies. Hence, it should be considered explicitly to accurately simulate the impact of ACTs on pavement damage accumulation. This study presents a framework that improves any analytical pavement damage accumulation approach to take a lateral position of loading as an explicit input. In this paper, the developed framework was applied on the state-of-the-practice pavement design approach, Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guideline (MEPDG). MEPDG's damage accumulation equations (i.e. rutting and fatigue cracking) were reinforced with curve fitting and function approximation techniques for explicit consideration of the lateral position. A simple numerical example was presented in the paper to demonstrate the effects of positioning wheel loads on accumulated damage.