Literature Search and Synthesis – Verification and Local Calibration/Validation of the MEPDG Performance Models for Use in Georgia

The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) is transitioning from empirical design procedures to the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) procedure for designing new and rehabilitated highway pavements. GDOT currently uses the 1972 AASHTO Interim Guide for Design of Pavement Structures as the standard pavement design procedure. As a part of the implementation process, GDOT has undertaken a project to verify the MEPDG global distress models and locally calibrate these models for local field conditions of Georgia, if determined to be necessary by the verification process, using the Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) and non-LTPP sections in Georgia. A comprehensive literature search was conducted at the beginning of the project to collect, review, and summarize available information on both completed and ongoing MEPDG implementation activities by various federal and state agencies. The literature search covered a full spectrum of the implementation process from material characterization research to local calibration and full-scale deployment. This report synthesizes the current and completed implementation activities by the State DOTs and identifies outcomes from those implementation studies that will be of benefit to GDOT in their implementation activities. More importantly, the interim report summarizes the lessons learned from various calibration studies that are directly applicable to Georgia for use in determining appropriate design inputs, setting up a sampling matrix to verify, locally calibrate, and validate the MEPDG transfer functions, and selecting design reliability and performance criteria.