A Practice towards Pavement Monitoring and Evaluation

Pavement condition monitoring and evaluation is important in many areas of pavement engineering, especially in pavement management. The in-service performance of the pavement depends on consistent, cost-effective and accurate monitoring of condition for early scheduling of repair and maintenance. Non Destructive Testing (NDT) has played a major role in pavement condition monitoring, assessments and evaluation accomplishing continuous and quick collection of pavement data. The analysis of this data can lead to indicators related to trigger values (criteria) that define the pavement condition based on which the pavement “health” is perceived helping decide whether there is the need or not to intervene in the pavement. However in order to support effectively the implementation of pavement management activities, sometimes there is the need to apply a framework for pavement monitoring and evaluation that highway/road agencies can adapt as the case may be. For this purpose the present research concerns the development of a practice towards pavement monitoring and evaluation that is outlined by four basic pillars: NDT data, periodic monitoring, reliable analysis methods and weighed evaluation criteria. The proposed practice referred with the acronym PAME (PAvement Monitoring and Evaluation) is implemented on a highway using individual data i.e. traffic (ESALs), layers thickness, deflections and roughness in order to determine the optimum section strategies and priority interventions. More details are included in the paper.