Development of a QC/QA Process for Caltrans Automated Pavement Condition Survey Data

Florida Department of Transportation yearly maintenance and rehabilitation activities include milling and resurfacing of approximately 2,000 lane miles of roadway, with an average resurfacing depth of about 2.1 in. (55 mm). These activities result in the generation and accumulation of roughly 1.8 million tons of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) each year. The use of elevated quantities of RAP in asphalt pavement provides an environmentally responsible solution to the accumulated RAP surplus in some urban areas, while at the same time offering an economical pavement maintenance and rehabilitation option to local agencies facing budget constraints. The objective of this project was to compare the performance of mixtures with 60% RAP content to be used primarily on low volume roads (average daily traffic <750 vehicles) and suggest adequate test methods within the context of a balanced mix design approach. To accomplish this objective, three types of mixtures were considered: hot, cold with emulsion, and cold with foamed binder. Performance testing included intermediate temperature cracking, rutting, moisture susceptibility, and durability. The hot recycled mixtures showed good moisture susceptibility and cracking resistance, especially when rejuvenators were incorporated. The cold recycled mixtures showed poor moisture susceptibility and durability characteristics, which were alleviated when hydrated lime or Portland cement was incorporated in the emulsified and foamed mixtures, respectively. Most hot recycled mixtures, and all the cold recycled mixtures, exhibited poor rutting behavior, likely because of the harsh conditions of the test. A life-cycle cost analysis demonstrated more favorable savings when cold recycled mixtures were used.

This paper evaluates the half-life performance of the first three 40 year design life jointed plain concrete pavements built in California, in the early 2000s. The projects, two on I-15 and one on I-40, have a combined total length of 420 lane kilometers (260 lane miles), are in desert areas, and have heavy truck traffic. The pavement performance evaluation used data from the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) pavement-management system (PMS) databases, including pavement condition surveys, field data, and construction histories. An in situ evaluation of the projects done in 2022 included measurement of international roughness index (IRI), visual inspection, coring, and falling-weight deflectometer testing. Cores were extracted to explain the field performance based on the modulus of elasticity, compressive strength, electrical resistivity, coefficient of thermal expansion, water absorption, and degree of hydrations of concrete. Overall, the performance of the projects has been excellent so far: the transverse and third-stage cracking (slabs with two or more cracks) is essentially zero in all lanes, faulting is also essentially zero, longitudinal cracking is not severe, and the IRI has been stable since construction. Concrete mix designs and properties from cores correspond to durability observations. AASHTOWare Pavement ME analysis supports the excellent performance of the projects. Further, none of the three projects has required any maintenance or rehabilitation activity since their construction. The outcomes of this study support Caltrans’ adoption of 40 year designs as the standard design life of concrete pavements and encourage the consideration of longer design lives.

Aim: The study based on research conducted in twelve EU countries aims to illustrate how and to what extent the quality control and assurance mechanisms, as outlined in the policy cycle for integrated border management in Europe and Frontex's operational strategy, are reflected in the regulation of border management practices in the surveyed countries. Methodology: Document and content analysis and conduct of semi-structured interviews. Findings: In the countries examined, quality control and assurance systems play a crucial role in enhancing border management and internal security. All countries prioritize ensuring that their border management systems remain operational and adaptable to the ever-evolving challenges. During inspections, self-assessments, and internal audits, countries employ various, though often similar, tools and methods aligned with European standards. Value: So far, there has been limited research in this field. The first part of the study examines the standards that regulate the development of integrated border management in the European Union, with a particular focus on provisions related to quality control and quality assurance in border management. In the second part, the authors investigated the quality control mechanisms of the national border administrations in twelve EU Member States. This analysis was conducted through documentary and content analysis, alongside semi-structured interviews with experts from the twelve countries. The findings of the research, and the conclusions drawn from them, may provide a strong basis for enhancing the effectiveness of the quality control and assurance processes within domestic border management.

OBJECTIVE: To describe all stages of developing strategies and quality control in the Aging and Brain Working Study linked to the Estudo Longitudinal de Saúde do Adulto (ELSA-Brasil – Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health), a prospective cohort of 15,105 civil servants (aged 35–74) followed up since 2008. METHODS: Based on the sample of participants alive at the beginning of the sample selection in September 2022 (n = 4,566) from ELSA-Brasil (Centro Investigação São Paulo), a representative sample of 2,165 individuals was calculated according to the following criteria and divided into two subsamples: (1) Sample of participants < 70 years old in Wave 3 (2017–2019) randomized according to cognitive trajectory from Wave 1 to 3, n = 1,670; (2) SuperAgers case-control sample, individuals aged ≥ 70 years in Wave 3, based on episodic memory in Wave 3, n = 495 participants (171 cases, 324 controls). The processes implemented to ensure quality control of information prior to data collection were selection of data collection instruments, training and certification of teams, preparation of a manual of definitions and standardized operating procedures, pilot studies, data collection logistics, harmonization of imaging protocols, and creation of an anti-noise device. Given the scope of the study, its multicenter nature, and the diversity of measures involved, this project required the implementation of effective quality assurance and control protocols, ensuring standardization, methodological consistency, and data integrity at all stages. RESULTS: After implementing the quality assurance and control processes, the final stages related to clinical and imaging data collection, management, and continuous monitoring of f ield activities were conducted, with weekly reports and statistical monitoring of the sample. CONCLUSIONS: The adoption of systematic stages of development and quality control was fundamental to ensure the production and reliability of information from brain neuroimaging studies.

Lafarge Infrastructure Team had constructed Malaysia’s first hybrid concrete pavement using Jointed Plain Concrete Pavement (JPCP) and Roller Compacted Concrete (RCC) at Lafarge’s Kanthan Cement Plant, Ipoh, Malaysia. The main purpose of the project is to showcase and study construction challenges in combining JPCP and RCC hybrid product for road solutions. The progress and pavement performance were monitored recorded and detailed through tests and site observation reports. JPCP pavement was constructed using two (2) type of construction methods; slip form and fixed form, while RCC pavement was laid and constructed using an asphalt paver set. The Quality Assurance & Control (QA/QC) monitored comprises of concrete design mix, concrete slump, concrete delivery, joints insertion, concrete curing, compaction, profile levels, saw cut and sequence of construction activities. Throughout the study, we have managed to table out the “Challenges and Best Practices” on the construction methods which mainly involves labours, machinery and material. All the information has been taken into consideration, to prepare a comprehensive report for the project. The study will enhance the knowledge and understanding for road owners, concrete suppliers, consultants and contractors in understanding the right application of JPCP and RCC in the future. We able to share and propose few best practices based on the challenges that we had face.

Open Source Software (OSS) is software products available to the public, with its source code to study, change, and improves its design. Open Source Software Development (OSSD) is the process by which open source software is developed within the confines of software engineering life-cycle methods. However when open source used for commercial purpose, then an open source license is required. Open source software is very often developed in a public and collaborative manner. The quality assurance principle under open source software development is an approach to improve software product quality against traditional methods and techniques. Despite the fact that the open source developments have seen remarkable successful in recent years, there are a number of product quality issues and challenges facing the open source development model. Many industries and business sectors are following or using OSSD, since they realize the benefits, but they do have some reservations concerning quality assurance in the form of program code quality, maintenance of the code and its quality, over the life-cycle of the product and third party usage. This paper reviews the literature of the process of the latest quality assurance, under open source software development methods and techniques. The result from this review is to show the process of quality assurance of open source software and that how it can affect the overall quality assurance principal.

Road roughness is a major factor in pavement condition because of its effects on pavement resurfacing and vehicle operating costs. Rougher pavements require more frequent resurfacing, generate complaints from highway users, reduce optimum travel speeds, disrupt traffic flow, and create safety hazards. Ride specification is one of the tools practiced by almost all state agencies including the Virginia Department of Transportation (DOT) to achieve the desired smoothness on the road. A ride specification dictates the level of smoothness from paving projects and can adjust the contractor's payment, depending on the finished ride. Virginia DOT's experience, accomplishments, and challenges with ride specifications are presented. Through application of the ride specification during the past decade, the ride quality on Virginia's rideability project roads has continued to improve. The average roughness after paving has improved dramatically in the past few years compared with that of the early 2000s. Between 2005 and 2009, 3,068 lane miles were paved according to the ride specification and a net bonus of $4,928,422 was paid to contractors. The benefit of having smoother roads could result in direct savings to an agency from deferring resurfacing activities by about 2 years and substantial savings in terms of fuel efficiency (especially for the trucks), reduced congestion due to deferred resurfacing, reduced vehicle maintenance costs (from smoother roads), and other benefits. The estimated benefits from applying the ride specification during 2005 to 2009 are found to far outweigh the cost.

As standards in best practices in data quality assurance and quality control evolve, methods for discovery and transport of information relating to these practices must also be developed. An observation’s history, from sensor descriptions, processing methods, parameters and quality control tests to data quality flags and sensor alert flags, must be accessible through standards-based web services to enable machine-to-machine interoperability. This capability enables a common understanding and thus an underlying trust in the expanding world of ocean observing systems. For example, a coastal observatory conducts several tests to evaluate and improve the quality of in situ time series data (e.g. velocity) and then generate an oceanic property (e.g. wave height). Using content-rich webenabled services, a data aggregation center will be able to determine which tests were conducted, interpret data quality flags and provide value added services, such as comparing the parameter with those from near-by observations. These additional processing steps may also be documented and sent along with the data to other participating ocean observing systems throughout the world. By utilizing standards-based protocol (Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) frameworks) and welldefined community adopted QA/QC (Quality Assurance/Quality Control) tests and best-practices (Quality Assurance in Real-Time Oceanographic Data QARTOD), information about the system provenance, sensor and data processing history needn’t be lost. Are data providers ready, willing and able to describe sensors and processing history? And can we transport the information using a framework that offers semantic and syntactic interoperability? The group developing this community white paper has demonstrated that it can be and is being done. A project called Q2O, QARTOD to OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), bridges the QARTOD community with the OGC community to demonstrate and document best practices in the implementation of QA/QC within the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) framework. This paper describes this demonstration project and documents the existence of parallel related efforts. With adequate funding to enable the strengthening and broadening of these communities, a solid foundation for ocean observing systems will be built with the assurance that best-practices of data quality are communicated in a meaningful way.

Hot mix asphalt pavements comprise approximately 96% of the paved roadway surfaces in North America. Strategies employed to rehabilitate these surfaces vary widely at a cost of approximately $600 million annually. The Colorado Department of Transportation maintains approximately 28,000 lane miles of asphalt pavements. Of the many rehabilitation strategies employed to maintain this network, three strategies have been utilized most frequently. These strategies are: 1) overlays, 2) cold milling with overlay, and 3) heater scarification and overlay. This research was conducted to determine the expected life-cycle of these strategies. Performance was judged based on smoothness, permanent deformation, and cracking. Independent variables included asphalt binder, traffic, aggregate gradation, and climate. Results of this analysis indicate two of the rehabilitation strategies perform approximately equally with one performing slightly better than the other, and both performing significantly better than the third. Polymer-modified asphalts enhanced pavement performance depending on which rehabilitation strategy was utilized. Some pavements were rehabilitated after reaching the zero-remaining-service-life threshold. As a result, the expected life of the rehabilitation strategies utilized on these pavements may be shorter than could be expected had rehabilitation been done before distress reached this high level.

Point-of-care testing (POCT) provides rapid, accurate results that facilitate diagnosis and patient management. POCT for infectious agents allows timely infection prevention and control interventions and informs decisions around safe patient...

The complexity of generating radiotherapy treatments demands a rigorous quality assurance (QA) process to ensure patient safety and to avoid clinically significant errors. Machine learning classifiers have been explored to augment the scope and efficiency of the traditional radiotherapy treatment planning QA process. However, one important gap in relying on classifiers for QA of radiotherapy treatment plans is the lack of understanding behind a specific classifier prediction. We develop explanation methods to understand the decisions of two automated QA classifiers: (1) a region of interest (ROI) segmentation/labeling classifier, and (2) a treatment plan acceptance classifier. For each classifier, a local interpretable model-agnostic explanation (LIME) framework and a novel adaption of team-based Shapley values framework are constructed. We test these methods in datasets for two radiotherapy treatment sites (prostate and breast), and demonstrate the importance of evaluating QA classifiers using interpretable machine learning approaches. We additionally develop a notion of explanation consistency to assess classifier performance. Our explanation method allows for easy visualization and human expert assessment of classifier decisions in radiotherapy QA. Notably, we find that our team-based Shapley approach is more consistent than LIME. The ability to explain and validate automated decision-making is critical in medical treatments. This analysis allows us to conclude that both QA classifiers are moderately trustworthy and can be used to confirm expert decisions, though the current QA classifiers should not be viewed as a replacement for the human QA process.

Asphalt road reflectance spectra change as pavement ages. This provides the possibility for remote sensing to be used to monitor a change in asphalt pavement conditions. However, the relatively narrow geometry of roads and the relatively coarse spatial resolution of remotely sensed imagery result in mixtures between pavement and adjacent landcovers (e.g., vegetation, buildings, and soil), increasing uncertainties in spectral analysis. To overcome this problem, multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) was used to map the asphalt pavement condition using Worldview-2 satellite imagery in this study. Based on extensive field investigation and in situ measurements, aged asphalt pavements were categorized into four stages—preliminarily aged, moderately aged, heavily aged, and distressed. The spectral characteristics in the first three stages were further analyzed, and a MESMA unmixing analysis was conducted to map these three kinds of pavement conditions from the Worldview-2 image. The results showed that the road pavement conditions could be detected well and mapped with an overall accuracy of 81.71% and Kappa coefficient of 0.77. Finally, a quantitative assessment of the pavement conditions for each road segment in this study area was conducted to inform road maintenance management.

This study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of an active survey method for detecting anesthesia nonroutine events (NREs). An NRE is any aspect of clinical care perceived by clinicians or observers as a deviation from optimal care based on the context of the clinical situation. A Comprehensive Open-ended Nonroutine Event Survey (CONES) was developed to elicit NREs. CONES, which consisted of multiple brief open-ended questions, was administered to anesthesia providers in the postanesthesia care unit. CONES data were compared with those from the same hospital's anesthesia quality assurance (QA) process, which relied on self-reporting of predefined adverse events. CONES interviews were conducted after 183 cases of varying patient, anesthesia, and surgical complexity. Fifty-five cases had at least one NRE (30.4% incidence). During the same 30-month period, the QA process captured 159 cases with 96.8% containing at least one NRE among the 8,303 anesthetic procedures conducted (1.9% overall incidence). The CONES data were more representative of the overall surgical population. There were significant differences in NRE incidence (P < 0.001), patient impact (74.5% vs. 96.2%; P < 0.001), and injury (23.6% vs. 60.3%) between CONES and QA data. Outcomes were more severe in the QA group (P < 0.001). Extrapolation of the CONES data suggested a significantly higher overall incidence of anesthesia-related patient injury (7.7% vs. only 1.0% with the QA method). An active surveillance tool using the NRE construct identified a large number of clinical cases with potential patient safety concerns. This approach may be a useful complement to more traditional QA methods of self-reporting.

There are over four million miles of two-lane roadways across the United States, of which a substantial portion is low-volume roads (LVR). Traditionally, most traffic safety efforts and countermeasures focus on high-volume high-crash urban locations. This is because LVRs cover an extensive area, and the rarity of crashes makes it challenging to use crash data to monitor the safety performance of LVRs regularly. In addition, obtaining up-to-date roadway information, such as pavement or shoulder conditions of an extensive LVR network, can be exceptionally difficult. In recent times, crowdsourced hard-acceleration and braking event data have become commercially available, which can provide precise geolocation information and can be readily acquired from different vendors. The present paper examines the potential use of this data to identify opportunities to monitor the safety of LVRs. This research examined approximately 12 million hard-acceleration and hard-braking events over a 3-months period and 26,743 crashes, including 9373 fatal injuries over the past 5-year period. The study found a moderate correlation between hard acceleration/hard-braking events with historical crash events. This study conducted a hot spot analysis using hard-acceleration/hard-braking and crash datasets. Hotspot analysis detected spatial clusters of high-risk crash locations and detected 848 common high-risk sites. Finally, this paper proposes a combined ranking scheme that simultaneously considers historical crash events and hard-acceleration/hard-braking events. The research concludes by suggesting that agencies can potentially use the hard-acceleration and hard-braking event dataset along with the historical crash dataset to effectively supervise the safety performance of the vast network of LVRs more frequently.

The 2003 revision of the standard United States death certificate included a set of "pregnancy checkboxes" to ascertain whether a woman was pregnant at the time of her death or within the preceding year. Studies validating the pregnancy checkbox have indicated a potentially high number of errors, resulting in inflated maternal mortality rates. In response to concerns about pregnancy checkbox data quality, four state health departments implemented a quality assurance pilot project examining the accuracy of the pregnancy checkbox for 2016 deaths. State staff conducted searches for birth or fetal death reports that matched a death certificate, within a year of death. If a pregnancy checkbox was marked, but no match was found between certificates, confirmation of the pregnancy was attempted through active follow-up with the death certifier. From December 2017 to January 2018, the quality assurance pilot was evaluated through three focus groups with key stakeholders. The evaluation aimed to describe opportunities and challenges to implementation, sustainability, and lessons learned. Opportunities for implementing the pilot included written documentation of the quality assurance process, improved certifier response, improved data quality, and increased data timeliness for Maternal Mortality Review Committees. Challenges included initial delays in certifier response, staff turnover, high caseloads in relation to resources, and lack of pilot prioritization in the health department. All four pilot states plan to sustain the pregnancy checkbox quality assurance process in some capacity. Implementing quality assurance processes for the pregnancy checkbox may ultimately improve state and national maternal death data quality.