UTILIZING THE LONG-TERM PAVEMENT PERFORMANCE DATABASE IN EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PAVEMENT SMOOTHNESS

This research project was performed in two phases. The first phase concentrated on previous\nrelated literature review and a nationwide survey to find out the current practices of smoothness\nspecifications. The second phase dealt with collecting and analyzing yearly roughness data for\nasphalt and concrete sections in IRI unit from the long-term pavement performance (LTPP)\ndatabase and evaluating the effect of initial roughness on the long-term performance of pavements.\nSome important conclusions from the previous related research and the present practices of\nroughness measurements are summarized in chapter II. Also, the current practices of Datapave\nsoftware use are mentioned. Chapter III summarizes the findings of a nation-wide survey on\npavement smoothness policies. Chapter IV outlines the design of the experiment for this research\nproject. In Chapter V, different statistical analyses were performed on the data set to evaluate the\neffect of initial roughness on future roughness. Finally, a summary of the entire research,\nconclusions, and recommendations for future research are presented in Chapter VI.\n