A Comprehensive System for AASHTO PP67-10 Based Pavement Crack Evaluation

A comprehensive crack evaluation system is necessary for pavement management. However, low data quality in automated data acquisition and lack of supportive protocols in the past hindered the development of such an index system. Recently, the landscape of crack measurement has changed with the advancement of 3D 1mm pavement data collection and automated analysis system. Meanwhile, new crack protocols are released to aid the fully automated crack detection. In the light of the AASHTO crack protocol PP67-10 and the high quality crack data produced with PaveVision3D Ultra system, this paper develops an index system for overall crack evaluation. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is employed to establish the general framework for the index. In this study, fuzzy set theory is adopted to convert the actual severity and intensity measures into normalized scores. Multiple data combination techniques are applied for data aggregation. The final product of this system, a single number crack index representing the overall crack condition, can be used to rank pavements and prioritize crack-oriented maintenance and rehabilitation projects. Furthermore, crack indices for different zones of the pavement surface can also be derived from the system. A case study containing ten 100m pavement sections is performed to demonstrate the applicability of this proposed evaluation system.