Establishing Pavement Deterioratin Models for Low Volume Roads using Response Surface Method

Abstract

Road transport in India plays a significant role in the overall transportation system of the country, due to its advantages like easy availability, flexibility in operation. India has the second largest network of roads in the world, next to USA. The total road length in the country is over 4.7 million km, a spatial road density of about 1km/km2 of area. Of the total network, the Low Volume Roads (LVRs) constitutes 90% which indicates their importance. These roads are generally granular pavements with or without a bituminous surfacing layer and the design of which is usually done by an empirical method considering subgrade strength as the main contributing factor towards its design. In India, over the last two decades huge investments are being pumped in for the construction of LVRs. The pavement maintenance decisions for this category of roads are generally based on the skimpy rules and rules of thumb of engineers without evaluating the actual pavement performance criteria. The rate of pavement deterioration depends on the timing of the maintenance intervention, choice of the type of maintenance treatment, and the quality of the construction. It is in this context, pavement deterioration prediction models and the evaluation of performance of in-service pavements are essential. A few studies were carried out in India in the past on the performance of LVRs. Deterioration models are developed for LVRs using the data collected on key distresses parameters. This aim of this study is to investigate the significant factors that affect the pavement deterioration of LVRs at the project level. Response surface methodology (RSM) is a collection of mathematical and statistical techniques for empirical model building. By careful design of experiments (DOE), the objective is to optimize a response (output variable) which is influenced by several independent variables (input variables). To achieve this, a relation between observations of the distress parameters (independent parameters) and the pavement age and traffic applications is developed with Response Surface Methodology (RSM) which is analyzed using Minitab software and model were developed.