PENNDOT'S EXPERIENCE IN DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF AUTOMATED PAVEMENT CONDITION SURVEYS

This report focuses on the steps the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) followed to replace their manual, surface distress, pavement management rating procedure with automated distress equipment available from an independent service provider. The project team, a combination of PennDOT main office engineers and Texas Research and Development Foundation (TRDF) staff, first concentrated on development of a new distress rating procedure for collecting pavement distress data. The new distress data collection procedure considered both PennDOT's pavement management needs and the current capabilities of distress data collection equipment. Next, an experimental design was developed to determine the appropriate testing procedure to ensure that service provider supplied data could be successfully compared to PennDOT manual distress data using a manual procedure based on the new automated distress rating procedure. Finally, data collected by the raters and service provider were compared to each other to determine how well each vendor and manual rater compared to the group. Information from the service provider data analysis was used to award a pavement management data collection contract. The procedure used to award the contract was not a simple function of a service provider's ability to collect distress data and report pavement distress. Rather PennDOT used a weighting scheme that included: distress collection and performance, data take-off/analysis method, proposed work plan, and price to estimate who would provide the "best-value" for pavement management surface distress and roughness data collection.