The assessment of damage to Texas highways due to oversize and overweight loads considering climatic factors

ABSTRACT

Transportation agencies should have the capacity to evaluate the damage caused by oversize and overweight (OS/OW) vehicles in order to develop effective infrastructure management and rehabilitation strategies. In this paper, we discussed how to combine different paradigms that influence pavement performance into a single evaluation methodology by integrating the most available historical data with respect to the characteristics of OS/OW vehicles (i.e. dimension and weight), their origin and destination, permitted routes, frequency of the routes, pavement condition data, and climatic effects. The proposed methodology is then implemented into three case studies to indicate its applicability and practicality. In the case studies, we evaluate the impacts of OS/OW loads on pavements under different scenarios and combinations of the related factors. The corresponding relationships between pavement conditions and passing OS/OW loads are quantified with a well-accepted sigmoidal function. The results also indicate that, at the early age of the road, higher OS/OW loading would bring a faster deterioration rate (e.g. about 6% of the reduction in service life for extreme high OS/OW loading, while only 2.35% for low OS/OW loading). At the end of road life, the reduction trend slows down, nearly above 2% for all OS/OW loading levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Oversize/overweight vehicles
• pavement management
• climate zones
• Texas
• PMIS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Southern Plain Transportation Center (SPTC) [project number SPTC 14.1-45].