Calibration of a Pavement Roughness Model Based on Finite Element Simulation

Abstract

In this paper calibration and verification of a roughness performance model of flexible pavements, which was previously developed, are conducted. One hundred and ten in-service pavement sections were extracted from the Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) database 2000 (Federal Highway Administration (2000) “Long Term Pavement Performance Database”, LTTP Data Pave 2000, Version 1, U.S. Department of Transportation, Washington, DC, U.S.A.), eighty-six of which were used for calibration and the remainder were used for verification. These pavement sections were taken from four different climatic zones: dry freeze, dry no-freeze, wet freeze and wet no-freeze.

Calibration factors were determined for each climatic zone by minimizing the differences between observed and predicted roughness data at all ages. Calibration factors were determined and incorporated in the roughness performance model so that a minimum total prediction error (TPE) was obtained. The calibration factors for the four climatic zones and the global zone ranged from 0.689 to 0.757. For all the climatic zones the observed and predicted roughness data after calibration were very well correlated with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.879 to 0.913, which proves the applicability of the model.

Keywords:

• Flexible pavement
• Roughness Model
• Calibration
• Verification
• Performance

Notes

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