A Rational Method for Relating As-Built Quality to Pavement Performance and Value

Abstract

Highway construction specifications routinely use adjusted-payment provisions to award payment in proportion to the level of quality received. Work that meets the level of quality defined as acceptable is eligible for 100 percent payment, whereas work that fails to meet the desired quality level but that is not sufficiently deficient to warrant removal and replacement typically receives some degree of pay reduction. More recently, many agencies have begun to offer monetary incentives in the form of bonus provisions for work that substantially exceeds the desired level of quality. Although the pay-adjustment approach to highway quality assurance is now widely used, there is not yet a consistency of practice regarding the magnitude of pay adjustment judged appropriate for varying levels of as-built quality. To achieve consistency and make this approach more effective and defensible, there is need for a method to relate as-built quality to expected performance, which can then be related to value by engineering-economics procedures. The extension and refinement of earlier work are described here and an example structured around one of the performance relationships in the AASHTO Guide for Design of Pavement Structures is provided. This methodology suggests that many pay schedules currently in use may not fully recoup the real costs incurred by highway agencies as a result of defective work.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

AASHTO Guide for Design of Pavement Structures. AASHTO, Washington, D.C., 1993.

Sweet

Legal Aspects of Architecture, Engineering, and the Construction Process, 2nd ed. West Publishing Company, Saint Paul, Minn., 1977, pp. 405–406.

Weed

R. M.

OCPLOT: PC Program to Generate Operating Characteristic Curves for Statistical Construction Specifications. In Transportation Research Record 1491, TRB, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1995, pp. 18–26.

NCHRP Synthesis of Highway Practice 232: Variability in Highway Pavement Construction. TRB, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1996, p. 20.

Burrington

R. S.

Handbook of Mathematical Tables and Formulas. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973, pp. 8–11.

Weed

R. M.

Method to Establish Pay Schedules for Rigid Pavement. In Transportation Research Record 885, TRB, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1982, pp. 18–24.

Weed

R. M.

Development of Air Voids Specification for Bituminous Concrete. In Transportation Research Record 1491, TRB, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1995, pp. 33–39.

Weed

R. M.

Quality Assurance Software for the Personal Computer (User Manual with Computer Diskette). FHWA, Demonstration Projects Division, U.S. Department of Transportation, Washington, D.C., 1996.