Effects of Comprehensive Quality Assurance/Quality Control Plan on Pavement Management

Highway agencies have intuitively known for years about the need for high-quality data in their pavement management systems. Until now, however, it has been difficult to arrive at the value of good data. In Virginia, pavement condition data for a large network of roads have been obtained from digital continuous videos and interpreted by using a semiautomated software process. A detailed quality assurance process has been developed and applied to achieve the desired high-quality data. The project includes quality assurance that has been carried out since the inception of the project, including the application of necessary adjustments in the data collection process, to ensure that quality data conforming to predefined standards are obtained. Further, during production the data are continually monitored with the goal of attaining high-quality data. When the volume of data is large as in the present case, continual application of a quality assurance process is vital not only to prevent major changes at any stage but also to provide data that are usable as they are available. The effects of a complete and comprehensive quality monitoring plan, including quality control, quality assurance, and an independent validation and verification, on pavement management data and the resulting budgetary estimates are quantified. Pre- and postindependent validation and verification results were analyzed to determine the effects of a comprehensive quality monitoring plan on pavement distress data collection.