Thesis
Sensitivity of the 2002 pavement design guide to traffic data input
Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
2004
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/263
Abstract
The vehicle load input to the 2002 Pavement Design Guide (PDG) is in the form of axle load distributions by axle configuration and truck class. In practice they are obtained by combining data from a variety of traffic monitoring equipment operating over various lengths of time, such as weigh-in-motion (WIM), automated vehicle classification (AVC) and automated traffic recording (ATR) systems. Changes in the length of time that traffic data is available for causes variation in the estimated axle load, which results in variation of pavement life predictions. The study at hand relates traffic data collection effort to variation in the predicted pavement life. At 50% reliability, scenarios 1-0, 1-1, and 1-2 all exhibit less than 10% overestimation of pavement life, suggesting that scenario 1-2 would be sufficient traffic data input at a 50% reliability level. Scenario 2-0 on average produced pavement life prediction overestimations less than 18% regardless of reliability level, and hence would represent a cost-effective data acquisition alternative to SS (site-specific) WIM. At 75%, 85%, 95%, and 99.9% reliability level, SS AVC data operating either one month (scenario 2-1) or one week (scenario 2-2) per season, combined with R (regional) WIM data, produces pavement life overestimation similar to that of the SS WIM system operating for one month per season (scenario 1-1).The average life overestimation resulting from SS ATR counts taken 1 week per season is 47% at a 95% reliability level. Pavement performance prediction using the 2002 PDG is highly dependent upon the traffic sampling scenario. Pavement life is also dependent upon the sources of the traffic data, and how much of it is site-specific. As expected, the more site-specific data, the more accurate the life prediction will be. PDG Traffic Input Levels as they currently are written do not address variation in data collection time. Therefore, the time of data acquisition should be considered when choosing data acquisition equipment.
Metrics
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Details
- Title
- Sensitivity of the 2002 pavement design guide to traffic data input
- Creators
- Michael Todd Bracher
- Contributors
- A. T. Papagiannakis (Degree Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Civil and Environmental Engineering, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
- Identifiers
- 99900525162101842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis