Resilience-Based Design and Assessment of Pavement Assets

Abstract: With the increased vulnerability of transportation infrastructure to extreme events and the consequences of climate change, resilience of transportation and infrastructure assets has become more critical. This paper discusses the workflow and components of a recently developed Pavement resilience-based design (PRBD) framework. This paper discusses the procedures to develop non-stationarity climatic models accounting for extreme events, flood events and freeze and thaw cycles impacting the pavements foundation and the pavements performance. These non-stationary climatic models are then used to derive a transfer function to model the response and changes in the pavements’ foundations. After determining the response of foundation layers, the paper discusses the stochastic models used to estimate the distribution of cumulative damage models over time and its impact of the pavement life-cycle models. Moreover, the paper will discuss reliability-based design procedures for pavements under extreme conditions. The proposed framework is tested against field and performance measurements for different pavement sections in multiple states. The field data includes long-term monitoring and evaluation before and after flood events considering a practical approach with limited field data. In addition, the paper will discuss the connection between project-level designs and network-level performance and planning. This will require the introduction of risk-based weight factors based on the criticality of the asset within the transportation network. This will serve as critical component to establish quantitative pavement resilience design and evaluation as part of overall resiliency plan for an agency.