Prediction of Pavement Crack Initiation from In-Service Pavements

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the success of pavement management systems largely depends on the quality of the deterioration models embedded in their structure. As such, much research has concentrated on developing a large array of approaches to model and predict pavement distress and deterioration. This study develops surface distress prediction models for pavement failure times (the initiation of cracking on the surface of flexible and semirigid pavements) on the basis of a large (more that 1,000 observations) and recent (1998) data set collected from in-service pavements in 15 European countries by using the principles of stochastic duration (hazard) models. The results indicate that, as expected, construction, traffic, and climatic factors affect pavement distress and that the lognormal functional form, in contrast with the findings of previous studies, best describes the distress initiation process.