APPLICATION OF RELIABILITY-BASED SAFETY FACTORS TO MECHANISTIC-EMPIRICAL FLEXIBLE PAVEMENT DESIGN

Abstract

Implementing mechanistic empirical pavement design approaches in practice, the need that the pavement performance level related to the limit state function can be controlled considering inherent variabilities associated with design input parameters and systematic bias of the design procedure is being more considerably presented. This paper presents the practical applications of principal reliability concepts to the ME pavement design and introduces a reliability based design approach for the ME flexible pavement design using overall and partial safety factors to design a pavement cross section satisfying performance threshold with a target reliability during its intended design life.