CEE Faculty Awarded $950K to Update the State’s Pavement Management System and Pavement Design Practices

Professors. A. Ricardo Archilla and Phillip K. Ooi were recently awarded a 5-year,  $950,000 contract by Hawaii Department of Transportation (HDOT) to update the current pavement management and pavement design practice for the State of Hawaii.  An updated pavement management system (PMS) will provide a succinct set of tools or methods that can assist decision-makers in finding cost-effective strategies for providing, evaluating, and maintaining pavements in a serviceable condition.  To develop such a system, proper information must be collected and periodically updated, predictions of the performance and costs of alternative strategies must be made, and optimization procedures that consider the entire pavement life cycle must be developed.  A concurrent but related task of this project is the updating of HDOT’s Pavement Design Manual in light of the recent release of the new mechanistic-empirical pavement design guide.  However, successful implementation of the guide requires calibration for local conditions.  Furthermore, much of the information for its field calibration should be obtained from the PMS database.  Consequently, once the Pavement Design Guide is calibrated, its results should be useful for pavement management at least at the project level.

This research deals with updating of the two aforementioned tools, which will result in a more efficient management of pavements in the State of Hawaii.  Highlights of some of the tasks include a study of the data collection technologies for distress identification, assessment of different PMS software implementations including issues on databases and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), collection and analysis of the available data, and calibration of the mechanistic-empirical transfer functions for local materials.