What Are the Most Important Items to Inspect on a Mechanically Stabilized Earth Wall? A Summary from 30 Experts

Abstract

Geotechnical asset management (GAM) demonstrates stewardship, provides data and processes for making informed decisions, and can enable financial savings throughout the geotechnical life cycle. For a GAM program to be effective, a well-defined inspection system for evaluating the current condition of assets is required. If the process contains a substantial number of inspection items, individual items need to be weighted based on relative importance. This paper focuses on the inspection system for Kansas Department of Transportation mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls. Although there is literature on what a Department of Transportation (DOT) may inspect on an MSE wall, there are currently no data available on which inspection item is most important. The objective of this paper is to establish the weights of 14 inspection items for MSE walls. This is done by interviewing 30 experts from North America using the analytical hierarchy process. The results are then further filtered by career and region. Overall, experts prioritize scour, internal drainage, wall tilting, and panel bowing as the most important, and panel staining and coping damage as least important. When filtered for subgroups, academics and industry prioritize internal drainage, whereas DOTs prioritize wall tilting. Industry and experts from northeast North America are unique in that they also prioritize electrical resistivity relatively high, but when this category is further queried for individual responses the scatter is wide. The framework presented in this paper addresses the need for identifying the most critical elements in an MSE wall inspection while also highlighting variability in individual responses.