Sensitivity of Pavement ME Design to Climate and Other Factors

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials' Guide for Mechanistic- Empirical Design of New and Rehabilitated Pavement Structures (MEPDG) and its supporting software, Pavement ME Design™, have challenged pavement designers to more thoroughly consider climatic, material and traffic inputs in order to evaluate a pavement design. Additionally, designers are now also tasked with evaluating pavement performance prediction outputs such as rutting and cracking rather than simply a structural number. In 2008, under the auspices of the Transportation Association of Canada's Pavements and Soils and Materials Standing Committees, a Canadian MEPDG User Group was formed as a discussion forum on challenges and implementation issues associated with this new pavement design methodology. As part of the work of that group and as a way to become more fluent with the software, trial flexible pavement designs were performed across Canada. This paper presents the results of those trial designs and highlights some of the findings for various weather stations across Canada. The results help demonstrate and validate the influence of asphalt cement grade, asphalt layer thickness and truck traffic volume on pavement performance and provide some insight into the effect of those parameters within the MEPDG. (A) For the covering abstract of this conference see ITRD record number 201402RT334E.