Development of Pavement Deterioration Models and Strategy for Maintenance Management

Abstract

Large scale industrialization and commercial activities since independence have resulted into an unprecedented traffic growth. The share of the road transport, in the last four decades, has increased from 26% to 80% for passenger traffic and from 11% to 60% for goods traffic. Due to paucity of the resources, stage construction practices have thus for been followed for the development of trunk roads. The network now is greatly short of its structural capacity for the present day unanticipated high traffic volumes. The increase in vehicle population during the same period has been about 70 times. The pace of growth of road infrastructure has not been commensurate with the growth of traffic. The road length has increased from 4 lack km in 1951 to only about 21 lack km in 1995. The trunk road network, consisting of NHs and SHs, through only about 8% of total road length, is responsible for catering to about 2/3 of goods traffic carried by the road sector in the country.

PMS includes activities with design, construction and maintenance of pavements. The PMS systems have become important tools for the road engineer to organize the activities of the road sector to meet the ever increasing demands of growing traffic in a developing country like India. The highway profession is at the crossroads and there are challenges, threats and pressures from all directions. Concerted efforts are now underway to developed road management and planning tools to improve upon the existing road network under the financial constraints. These tools are essential for the assessing the financial needs of the highway sector, evaluating the alternative maintenance strategies and prioritizing the work programs.

In this study, an attempt is made to development of pavement deterioration models to estimate the performance of the road network and to predict future deterioration levels of pavements with minimum data. For analysis selected stretches on the five major road networks in Warangal city are used to measure the various parameters related to pavement evaluation and data so obtained is used for development of the maintenance strategies for various distress Which are observed on the pavement?