A Mechanistic Approach to Pavement Crack Maintenance Prioritization

Abstract

Traditional practices of pavement crack maintenance prioritization are often based on subjective assessments and only consider crack width as the defining measure for representing severity of the cracks. In reality crack severity should logically be a function of the remaining fatigue life of a pavement. This assessment requires all characteristics of a crack to be considered including the depth and location of a crack for considering a mechanistic analysis as the basis for crack maintenance prioritization. This paper aims to improve the operational capability and practicality of the proposed approach by developing a crack prioritization model to establish maintenance priorities. The model is calibrated and validated, which is considered critical for any model, using a cross validation approach. The results from the validation process support the feasibility, practicality and wide-scale implementation of the proposed mechanistic approach.