Development of a Pavement Deterioration Model...

Development of a Pavement Deterioration Model for Secondary Roads of India

Author Name : Bibhuti Bhushan Bhardwaj, Rantu Swargiary, Kasturi Sarma, Samriddhi Gogoi, Shobhna Hazarika, Binong Kramsa, Shrweta Dutta

ABSTRACT

Road transport is the mode of transport, which can give full service to one and all. It has maximum flexibility for travel concerning route, direction, time, and speed of travel through any mode of road vehicle. In this regard, India has a vast road network. However, the road quality deteriorates due to environmental or climatic influences, inferior-quality materials, construction deficiencies, and many other factors. It calls for efficient maintenance to preserve the road in its originality and provide service to its user throughout its life. The budget approved by the government constrains the maintenance works. Therefore, it is beneficial to know how a pavement behaves in the future. An engineer can estimate a budget well in advance through timely intervention and meticulous planning. One way of approaching this situation is by predicting the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) of successive years, which gives an idea about the health of the pavement in the future. The most common distress parameters that affect PCI of pavement are traffic, subgrade soil quality, rainfall, pavement age, flood, drainage facility on roads, and thickness of different layers of pavement. Each parameter is used as an independent variable that increases or decreases ∆PCI value with different intensities. In other words, the change of pavement health (∆PCI) is individually analyzed with variation in each of the distress parameters. For this purpose, a pavement deterioration model is developed wherein; an equation predicts PCI of next year when the present values of distress parameters are fed into it. It gives an accurate idea of selecting road sections with the maximum probability of future deterioration and, therefore, is urgently needed for maintenance works. It allows the progressive prediction of the future condition of the road based on the present condition under a defined range of future loading and maintenance scenarios.

Keywords: Pavement, PCI, ∆PCI, Assam, State Highways, Major District roads, deterioration model, traffic