Study the Relationship between Pavement Surface Distress and Roughness Data

In this paper, pavement sections from the highway connected Jeddah to Jazan were selected and analyzed to investigate the relationship between International Roughness Index (IRI) and pavement damage including; cracking, rutting, and raveling. The Ministry of Transport (MOT) of Saudi Arabia has been collecting pavement condition data using the Road Surface Tester (RST) vehicle. The MOT measures Roughness, Rutting (RUT), Cracking (CRA), raveling (RAV). Roughness measurements are calculated in terms of the International Roughness Index (IRI). The IRI is calculated over equally spaced intervals along the road profile. Roughness measurements are performed at speed between at 80 kilometers per hour. Thus RST vehicle has been used to evaluate highways across the country. The paper shows three relationships including; cracking (CRA) verses roughness (IRI), rutting (RUT) verses IRI, and raveling (RAV) verses IRI. Also, the paper developed two models namely; model relates IRI to the three distress under study, and model relates IRI to ride quality. The results of the analysis claim at 95% confidence that a significant relationship exist between IRI and cracking, and raveling. It’s also shown that rutting did not show significant relationship to IRI values. That’s leads to conclude that the distresses types: cracking and raveling may possibly be described as ride quality distresses at different level of significant. Rutting distress described as non-ride quality type’s distresses.