A spatial analysis of pavement variability

Abstract

This paper looks at applying spatial statistics models to a number of types of data commonly available in pavement engineering, such as core thickness and air-void data, ground-penetrating radar-derived layer thicknesses and back-calculated stiffness values. The goals of the paper are to show how spatial statistics can be used to aid in the understanding of pavement-related data, to give some insights into what can and cannot be achieved, to aid pavement engineers exploring spatial statistics in understanding the results they are seeing in their analyses, and to help plan data collection and experiments. The focus of the paper is on determining the spatial properties, not in the use of the derived models in analysis, but some implications of spatial variability for pavement design are discussed.

Keywords::

• spatial variability
• pavement variability
• pavement design
• random fields
• reliability