DEVELOPMENT AND CALIBRATION OF A PAVEMENT SURFACE PERFORMANCE MEASURE AND PREDICTION MODELS FOR THE BRITISH COLUMBIA PAVEMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Pavement surface distress is a key performance measure used by provincial/state and municipal roadway agencies in their asset management systems for rehabilitation programming. It is a true engineering measure of the pavement deterioration and can serve as a diagnostic tool to determine rehabilitation needs and treatments. This paper outlines the methodologies that the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Highways followed for refining its pavement distress index, which is based on the PAVER model and to develop regional, default pavement deterioration models. Developing the Pavement Distress Index (PDI) involved several iterations of model refinement incorporating other agencies work, data analyses, in-house pavement expertise, ground-truthing and post evaluations. The prediction models were constrained by input from regional pavement managers as well as the PDI data collected over a period of four years. Families of curves were developed for each of five treatment types, three climatic zones, three traffic levels and three equivalent pavement structural thickness.