Investigations of Environmental and Traffic Impacts on "Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide" Predictions

The Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) represents a major improvement on its predecessors, particularly in its comprehensive coverage of environmental impact on pavement performance. Another improvement is the approach introduced to assess and accumulate damage created by traffic. A major strength of the MEPDG is the consideration given to the interaction between environmental, material, and traffic parameters, rather than consideration of only the parameters themselves. The process through which these interactions are considered sounds very comprehensive; however, is it practical? The Enhanced Integrated Climatic Model (EICM) is a core component of the MEPDG; it controls the material properties used in the analysis to a great extent. As a result, EICMpredictionshaveasignificantimpactonMEPDG-accumulateddamage and therefore on predicted service life. In a previous study, an effort was made to validate EICM predictions with field-measured temperature and moisture profiles outside the MEPDG....