Risk Analysis of Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Methods

Pavement design is moving from empirical methods to mechanistic-empirical methods, such as the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) developed in the USA. Since it is a more complicated design and modeling tool, it is necessary to conduct a risk analysis of the new system. Moreover, it is well accepted that uncertainty and risk (i.e. the variation of materials, forecasting of future traffic) should be understood and considered in pavement design. Different from conventional sensitivity analysis on design software, this paper considers the design process as a system and investigates the risk and uncertainty in the system using the Hierarchical Holographic Modeling (HHM) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). In total, 72 parameters are compared and ranked to find critical factors influencing the success of flexible pavement design. This paper could give a “out of box” view of pavement design using mechanistic-empirical methods and aid engineers in focusing on inputs that have the most effect on pavement design.