Abstract

ABSTRACT
Airport Pavement Management System
Assessing current condition and estimating remaining life from aircraft demand
Ali Asadollahkhan Vali
Road pavements management system (PMS) is a well-established approach that could benefit airports. For the implementation of an Airport Pavement Management System (APMS), there is a need to assess current pavement condition by considering observed distress levels and to match such condition to an apparent age, hence enabling the estimation of remaining life.
Traditionally the use of a global pavement condition indicator (PCI) is deployed by airport agencies. The estimation of PCI is done manually utilizing reference charts and tables. Automating this estimation is an imperative need. Furthermore, being able to predict the consumption of life by current and future aircraft demand (frequency and distribution) is key to airport operations.
AASHTO’s mechanistic empirical method was recalibrated to match fatigue after 20 years of operations of a case study on Mashhad International Airport in Iran. The method considers the fatigue damage analysis and includes various factors like aircraft traffic and their loadings and pavement structural parameters.
One of the objectives of this research was to automate the estimation of pavement condition index (PCI) based on observed distresses, facilitating the identification of damage and the association of remedial work. The second objective was to predict the pavement's remaining life by using the fatigue damage analysis technique by enabling the ability to predict pavement performance and the assumption that a pavement fails when the load repetition exceeds a certain threshold. By connecting both approaches, better decisions for the type of intervention and the timing of the intervention can be done.