Abstract
Pavement deterioration models provide useful predictions of distress initiation, for purposes of pavement design and management. A common problem in modeling the initiation is the inappropriate treatment of data censoring. If the censoring is not accounted for properly, the model may suffer from statistical biases. In this paper, an analysis of pavement crack initiation data based on the duration modeling techniques is presented. Duration models enable the stochastic nature of pavement crack initiation to be represented as well as censored data to be incorporated in the statistical estimation of the model parameters. The results show that the model predictions are more accurate than those obtained with the original AASHO model.
