摘要: |
The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) has launched DARWin-ME Pavement Design Software in April 2011. AASHTO, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), and many state highway agencies in the US have spent well over $50 million in the past decade on developing, refining, and calibrating the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG), the predecessor to DARWin-ME. Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department (AHTD) as a leader in MEPDG studies started supporting MEPDG research early on. As the next-generation pavement design procedure, DARWin-ME is embraced by many state highway agencies. As DARWin-ME requires a magnitude more data inputs, some of which are not familiar to pavement designers and not systematically stored and archived, it is imperative to have a process in place for AHTD to collect, analyze, prepare, and use the input data sets for DARWin-ME. Equally important, DARWin-ME will be also used as an analysis tool for pavement engineering due to its inclusion of many engineering principles, including prediction models, materials analysis, construction and as-built database, environment, and qualification of traffic data. This proposed research project will rely on know-how and experience from past AHTD sponsored projects on MEPDG development and establish a workflow in implementing DARWin-ME at AHTD with the long-term goal of establishing a supporting infrastructure for pavement engineering at AHTD using DARWin-ME as the core engine. |