PAVEMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS--PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

This articles reviews the past, present, and future of pavement management systems (PMSs). It is hard to say when the idea of systematically managing pavement networks first started. The first national workshops on pavement management were held in 1980 in Phoenix, Arizona, and Charlotte, North Carolina, with the goal of formulating and setting priorities for a national program of short- and long-term activities to be pursued by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and state agencies toward better management of pavements. Only five states had systematic procedures for managing pavement networks at that time. Now, all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have some form of pavement management programs in place or in development. Forty-two systems include a method of prioritization, and 20 states have a provision for optimization for purposes of budget planning and project programming. While 47 of the 52 agencies use the International Roughness Index (IRI) to measure ride, they use 10 different types of equipment. The dominant forms of distress being measured and included in PMS databases are rutting, faulting, and cracking. A divergence exists in the way that rut depth and faulting are measured and reported. Based on this, FHWA has contracted to develop standardized protocols for at least these four types of measurements: IRI, rut depth, faulting, and various types of cracking.