Unified Pavement Health Index: Comprehensive and Robust Approach to Measure Functional Condition of Asphalt Pavement Systems

Abstract

The objective of this study was to develop a generic pavement condition assessment scale, called the unified pavement health index (UPHI), that is capable of quantifying asphalt pavement surface quality, which could be altered based on region-specific conditions. The database, consisting of 541 road sections encompassing 1,345,397 data points in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India, was used to formulate the metric. Five severity-based distress indexes were established to estimate the UPHI on a scale of 0 to 100. The metric was categorized into five groups to help inform maintenance interventions. A deep neural network was developed to automatically compute the UPHI for distresses data, which had a coefficient of determination of 96.05%. It is envisioned that the unified metric developed in this study will help practitioners in assessing the pavement functional condition based on 18 distresses and suggest maintenance strategies for network-level management in a rapid and rational manner.