Reliable Statewide Pavement-Performance Study Using a Confidence Evaluation System

Abstract

There is an urgent need to develop a system to quantify survey data quality and to study pavement performance characteristics with levels of confidence. To address this need, a system is proposed to quantify historical asphalt pavement condition survey data quality. The proposed confidence evaluation system uses the indicators based on asphalt pavement life-cycle characteristics. The resulting confidence levels of the indicators are used to determine the confidence level of the analyzed pavement’s life curves and performance characteristics. Twenty-three years of asphalt pavement condition survey data were provided by the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) to validate the proposed system. The pavement’s life curves that have a high-confidence level can be obtained and used to analyze actual pavement performance; the average life of resurfacing effectiveness at a rating of 70 is approximately 9.4 years; this closely matches GDOT engineers’ assumption of 10 years of life, which is used for routine life-cycle cost analysis. The average project resurfacing time span, however, is 11.4 years, which indicates a 2-year lag for pavement preservation. More than 67 percent of the resurfacing projects are being delayed by more than one-year, indicating a serious problem. The derived load cracking propagation data indicates that this data can be used to support the development of reliable pavement life forecasting models.