Towards More Sustainable Pavement Management Practices Using Embedded Sensor Technologies

Road agencies are constantly being placed in difficult situations when making road maintenance and rehabilitation decisions as a result of diminishing road budgets and mounting environmental concerns for any chosen strategies. This has led practitioners to seek out new alternative and innovative ways of monitoring road conditions and planning maintenance routines. This paper considers the use of innovative piezo-floating gate (PFG) sensors and conventional strain gauges to continuously monitor the pavement condition and subsequently trigger maintenance activities. These technologies can help develop optimized maintenance strategies as opposed to traditional ad-hoc approaches, which often lead to poor decisions for road networks. To determine the environmental friendliness of these approaches, a case study was developed wherein a life cycle assessment (LCA) exercise was carried out. Observations from accelerated pavement testing over a period of three months were used to develop optimized maintenance plans. A base case is used as a guide for comparison to the optimized systems to establish the environmental impacts of changing the maintenance workflows with these approaches. On the basis of the results, the proposed methods have shown that they can, in fact, produce environmental benefits when integrated within the pavement management maintenance system.