Federal Highway Administration — Current PMS Requirements

The use of pavement recycling has steadily gained momentum over the last ten years. This includes various methods of both hot and cold recycling. Recycling has proven to be a reliable alternative to conventional methods of rehabilitation. The end product is of high quality and may be compared to similar methods employing only virgin materials. Though the use of these methods has increased, a method of selecting and specifying recycling agents has lagged behind. ASTM now has A Standard Practice for Classifying Hot Mix Recycling Agents (D 4552-87). A similar standard for emulsified products is now being investigated. This paper presents a classification system for the selection and use of emulsified recycling agents. This classification system is derived from currently used practices and extensive field observation of the interaction between materials and methods. Terminology, methods for selection, and general use guidelines are discussed. Recycling is an important part of any pavement management system (PMS). The Federal Highway Administration has mandated the adoption of a PMS for all states. A PMS will be used to select the appropriate rehabilitation and maintenance procedure based on accepted criteria. A standard system of classification and terminology will place recycling in its proper position within the PMS. Several state DOTs have established specifications for emulsified recycling products. As needs vary, so have these specifications. States and regions have reduced the full spectrum of products to those serving local needs. The classification system will allow easier transfer of technology as the terminology is standardized. The classification system defines the emulsified recycling agents by composition as well as by intended performance. With this system in place, engineers will be able to select products on the basis of equipment on hand, traffic constraints, and intended vehicle capacity. This system may be used in application from rural roads to interstate highways.

During the early 1980's, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Research Coimcil, under the sponsorship ofthe Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and with the cooperation ofthe American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) undertook a thorough study of the deterioration of the nation's highway and bridge infrastructure system. The study recommended that a Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP) be initiated to focus research and development activities that would make major contributions to improving highway transportation. The study report published as TRB Special Report 202 during 1984, emphasized six research areas, with the Long Term Pavement Perfonnance (LTPP) program as one ofthe key research areas. During 1985 and 1986, the detailed research programs were developed for SRRP by independent contractors. The detailed programs were published in May 1986 as a TRB Report entitled, "Strategic Highway Research Program - ResearchPlans." The Long Term Pavement Performance was envisioned as a comprehensive program to satisfy "the total range of pavement information needs." It draws on "technical knowledge ofpavements presently available and seeks to develop models that will better explain how pavements perform. It also seeks to gain knowledge of the specific effects on pavement performance of various design features, traffic and environment, use of various materials, construction quality, and maintenance practices." As sufficient data becomes available with time, analysis will be conducted by various agencies to provide better performance prediction models for use in design and pavement management, to provide much better understanding of the effects of many variables on pavement performance, and to provide new techniques for pavement design and construction. This paper focuses on one phase of the program -pavement instrumentation. Prior to limiting the focus, a brief overview ofthe overall LTPP program is presented

Le xington, in central Kentucky, is the second largest city in the state. Local government is by a mayor and council of elected representatives from twelve districts and three at-large representatives. The Department of Public Works headed by a Commissioner, who reports to the mayor and city-county council, administers the streets and roads system. The street and road network in Lexington consists of approximately 720 centerline miles. Approximately 100 miles are rural in nature and 620 miles are urban. Approximately 95 percent are bituminous surfaced roads; a majority of the remainder is constructed of portland cement concrete. Increasing costs for constructing and maintaining the street and road network was a stimulus to implement a systematic pavement and road surface management system. Available alternatives were reviewed, and it was decided to maximize in-house resources of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government. Meetings with public works officials were used to establish criteria for implementation of a management program: (a) program for visual condition survey of pavements, (b) procedure(s) to determine structural deficiencies for critical pavements identified in the visual condition survey, and (c) utilization of the above information to estimate rehabilitation strategies and their associated costs. The paper describes and documents three phases of implementation of a pavement and road surface management system. Phase I included development of a system­ wide inventory of pavements and a pavement condition rating system for both flexible and rigid pavements. Phase II dealt with the modifications to a microcomputer program to process pavement condition ratings for ranking pavements on the basis of need and also to estimate pavement maintenance and rehabilitation costs. Phase III included administrative and training activities necessary for implementation of the pavement management program. Training generally addressed three areas: (1) collection of pavement condition and distress information, (2) operation of the microcomputer program for data processing and analyses, and (3) interpretation and utilization of results of the analyses, Finally, the paper describes current research and development relating to refinements and modifications for the Lexington situation.

This report is designed to document the analysis process and estimation models currently used by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to estimate the off-highway gasoline consumption and public sector fuel consumption. An overview of the entire FHWA attribution process is provided along with specifics related to the latest update (2008) on the Off-Highway Gasoline Use Model and the Public Use of Gasoline Model. The Off-Highway Gasoline Use Model is made up of five individual modules, one for each of the off-highway categories: agricultural, industrial and commercial, construction, aviation, and marine. This 2008 update of the off-highway models was the second major update (the first model update was conducted during 2002-2003) after they were originally developed in mid-1990. The agricultural model methodology, specifically, underwent a significant revision because of changes in data availability since 2003. Some revision to the model was necessary due to removal of certain data elements used in the original estimation method. The revised agricultural model also made use of some newly available information, published by the data source agency in recent years. The other model methodologies were not drastically changed, though many data elements were updated to improve the accuracy of these models. Note that components in the Public Use of Gasoline Model were not updated in 2008. A major challenge in updating estimation methods applied by the public-use model is that they would have to rely on significant new data collection efforts. In addition, due to resource limitation, several components of the models (both off-highway and public-us models) that utilized regression modeling approaches were not recalibrated under the 2008 study. An investigation of the Environmental Protection Agency's NONROAD2005 model was also carried out under the 2008 model update. Results generated from the NONROAD2005 model were analyzed, examined, and compared, to the extent that is possible on the overall totals, to the current FHWA estimates. Because NONROAD2005 model was designed for emission estimation purposes (i.e., not for measuring fuel consumption), it covers different equipment populations from those the FHWA models were based on. Thus, a direct comparison generally was not possible in most sectors. As a result, NONROAD2005 data were not used in the 2008 update of the FHWA off-highway models. The quality of fuel use estimates directly affect the data quality in many tables published in the Highway Statistics. Although updates have been made to the Off-Highway Gasoline Use Model and the Public Use Gasoline Model, some challenges remain due to aging model equations and discontinuation of data sources.

Pavements constructed for the purpose of meeting the demand of highways which were emerged with the improving technological developments increased. And consequently, more resources were demanded to be directed to pavement maintenance and rehabilitation. Hereby, the concept of pavement management emerged. Although project-level analyses were found adequate previously, network-level evaluations were needed in order to do detailed planning as a result of resource allocation and transfer problems that were emerged later. Therefore, pavement management system has become compulsory for all pavements to be controlled together. In this framework, programming is needed in order to schedule maintenance–rehabilitation and develop costs with respect to budget. In the study carried out, a mode was developed in order to program the routine network maintenance activities in terms of Pavement Maintenance and Management Systems, and it was concluded that this problem can be solved through ant colony, using Visual Basic.

State highway agencies (SHAs) are required by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to develop Transportation Asset Management Plans (TAMP) in which the performance targets for roadway assets are determined. FHWA also developed national performance metrics to use in determining performance targets for pavements. However, for pavement assets, most SHAs employ their own performance metrics for pavement condition data reporting and performing maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) analysis. Therefore, there is a need to incorporate national performance measures into SHAs’ pavement management system to support the development of TAMP. In this study, new pavement performance metrics were proposed to assist SHAs in conducting M&R analysis. The relationships between the new metrics and existing pavement metrics used in the State of Tennessee were investigated. Comparison between the new metrics and the State’s metrics was made with reference to network-level condition summary and performance prediction models. Results indicated that the new performance metrics appeared to be stable and less sensitive to sectioning method. Similar time-series patterns of network-level performance deterioration were found between the State’s metrics and the new metrics. It is recommended that performance models be established based on the new metrics, as the deterioration rates from the two metrics were not well correlated.

Pavement management data used in measuring the performance of a pavement network contribute to managing maintenance and rehabilitation needs and determining the required funding levels. A network’s performance can be measured in several ways. The method adopted by the Virginia Department of Transportation has been in use for more than 15 years. With the introduction of Transportation Performance Management by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), a set of performance measures required by FHWA are to be reported. A few methods from earlier efforts by others in predicting one or more pavement performance parameters are briefly discussed. The main challenges in the determination of federal performance measures are the lack of prediction models for those measures; the reporting on 1/10th-mi sections that are not directly used in analysis and maintenance planning; and the determination of funding levels based on 1/10th-mi sections. In this paper, a new method to predict the federal performance measures of pavement networks from the state performance measures is provided, along with the mathematical models developed.

With the development of the pavement management system (PMS), the amount of the acquired and transmitted date is getting much larger [1][2]. Regard this, a compression method is needed for data analyzing. As there are lots of differences between the image of PMS and general image in the luminance distribution and the useful information region, general compression methods can not fit the special compression requirement of the PMS image. Although the PMS develops rapidly, the relevant image compression has little significant study. Based on Huffman coding and edge detection, this paper provides an efficient compression method, which can reserve all the useful information of the original image. The preliminary results show that the compression ration is higher than IS, which means it can work for the PMS.

The public and private sectors have been managing their assets in some form for many years. Recently, however, the concept of asset management has been formulated to draw more explicitly on the principles of business, technology, economics, and other disciplines in a systematic and integrated way. This strategy offers cost-effective and responsive advantages in managing the public’s assets. Other management systems, particularly pavement management, have preceded the current interest in asset management by several decades. Accordingly, it is useful to assess whether there are common elements between asset management and pavement management and, if so, whether the experience gained from pavement management implementation and operation can be of benefit. In a generic sense, asset management has extensive commonalities with its component systems such as pavement management. However, asset management has some issues to resolve in progressing from a framework to an operational reality. A number of ways or areas in which asset management system development and implementation can benefit from pavement management operational experience are presented. Finally, some technical, economic/technical, and institution and user opportunities for innovations and advancements in asset management systems are identified.

Local Road Administrations (LRA) manage wide and fragmented road networks with constrained financial and human resources. Though LRA manage the most road networks and the relative development and maintenance have a huge impact on environment and society, frequently, LRA cannot implement new technologies and methodological advancements because innovations are generally fitted to different kinds of users. For these reasons, the adoption of a customised pavement management system (PMS) for LRA is strongly recommended to define workflows, make investments, and find long-lasting and cost-effective solutions. Considering the goal of a sustainable development, new complex aspects must be also considered in the PMS matching policies, investment strategies and engineered solutions. Eco-sustainable techniques for the maintenance of road pavements and utility trenches must be gradually introduced in PMS involving stakeholders to preserve natural resources, to reduce atmospheric pollutions and to stimulate the local economic growth. The definition of a PMS guideline for LRA considering new concepts of a circular economy is a contemporary and open challenge. This paper shows a new PMS approach for LRA, including the strategy and requirements for environmentally friendly road materials that can be progressively adopted by each LRA to lessen the negative effects of maintenance activities on the environment.

A pavement management system (PMS) is a tool that supports decision-making specialists to maintain the pavement at an optimal service level. The absence of a PMS could lead to inadequate decision-making, a disorganized road inventory, poor selection in road maintenance techniques and inefficient technical support to justify the execution of maintenance activities. For these reasons, this research proposes the application of a PMS, with the objective of improving and standardizing the processes for evaluating the condition of roads that are under the jurisdiction of low-budget government organizations, guaranteeing the selection of the most appropriate type of maintenance. As a case of study, a 1.1 km local road located in one of the districts of Lima was evaluated, which was divided into 11 sections. With this evaluation, it was obtained that 2,605.43 m2 of the total road is in poor condition, due to the presence of functional failures. For the identification of failures, the pavement condition index (PCI), the international roughness index (IRI) and the present serviceability index (PSI) were used to determine the condition, roughness and serviceability of the pavement. In conclusion, it was identified that the proposed PMS is adequately adapted to the way of working and available budget of a local administration, since if it is applied it would only spend 20.55% of the fund that would be destined to a total reconstruction of road.

The U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) hosted a ``Concrete Pavement Strategic Planning Meeting'' in August 2019 for the purposes of 1) identifying future needs and directions in concrete pavement design, and 2) the development of strategies to increase the implementation of long-life concrete pavement (LLCP) design and construction. The meeting was attended by an Expert Task Group (ETG) of knowledgeable concrete pavement experts and practitioners representing highway agencies, academia, industry partners and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Many of the strengths and limitations of current concrete pavement design procedures were identified and discussed. It was recognized that AASHTOWare PavementME Design and other similarly sophisticated procedures represent a significant technological leap over empirical design procedures with which they compete (and often replace). However, there are concerns about performance model limitations, the cost-effectiveness of local calibration efforts, the emphasis on surface thickness design (often assuming, rather than designing, support conditions), and other issues. The potential service and economic benefits of LLCP were also discussed. The impetus for implementation (and benefits documented) by some agencies were described, as were the impediments to implementation for other agencies. Strategies were developed to help overcome the impediments identified and to facilitate broader use of LLCP. This paper summarizes key points raised on each of these issues and includes recommendations for future directions in concrete pavement design and increased implementation of LLCP.

Multi-criteria decision analysis for the selection of a near road ambient air monitoring site for the measurement of mobile source air toxics

Quantifying the association between obesity, automobile travel, and caloric intake

Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is a decision-making tool that allows governing agencies the ability to assess several long-term alternative investment options. This paper presents a LCCA analysis process which integrates the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) program, RealCost (a road user cost calculation program), the FHWA-endorsed Construction Analysis for Pavement Rehabilitation Strategies (CA4PRS) and Caltrans specific design tools (CalFP and CalAC), into the existing Caltrans LCCA process (a modified version of the FHWA LCCA process). In using tools backed by the FHWA and validated through previous agency use, the presented process has a potential to be replicated on urban corridor improvement projects across the US while aiding agencies in achieving economical sustainability throughout the infrastructure maintenance phases. This paper also fills the gap identified by Ozbay et al. in 2004, incorporating road user cost calculations into the LCCA process. Validation was achieved through the execution of the recently completed $1.4 B US California SR-91 Corridor Improvement Project. The SR-91 team used the presented tool to choose one of the two alternatives (maintain HOV SR-91 lane and add I-15 HOV lane using long-life Portland Cement Concrete Pavement or add Express Lane to SR-91 and I-15 using long-life Continuously Reinforced Concrete Pavement and Asphalt Concrete Pavement), equating to an estimated life-cost savings of $32 M.