Balancing Pavement Management, Software Requirements, and Data Collection Details

To optimize the life-cycle cost (LCC) of providing adequate pavement performance, good pavement management (PM) software and good data describing the pavement structure, behavior, condition, and performance are required. Advances have been made in the last decade, but agencies have not always been able to balance the cost and effort associated with these two phases. Modern PM software can produce detailed results predicting performance, developing rehabilitation programs and optimizing LCC, but such answers are only valid if pavement data used with the software are timely, accurate and economical to collect, process and store. The modern PMS is capable of subdividing networks into a large number of sections for consideration and recombining those into PM action (management) sections. Historical data collection is not always done in a way that allows data to be subdivided to properly define unique subsections. Modern data collection equipment, including deflection testing and ground penetrating radar, to evaluate in-place structure (usually at the project level), high-speed measurements of rutting and roughness to predict performance, and sophisticated condition data collection are now available in more economical and effective ways. This paper addresses these issues and discusses the interaction between good PMS software, quality data collection, and data aggregation and sectioning. Significant efforts are being made to improve these three parts of the process, but proper efforts are not always made to balance the cost between the efforts to insure that appropriate data are collected and realistic software is provided to analyze and use the data for better management decisions.