Development and Validation of Pavement Performance Models for the State of Maryland

The Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA) is in the process of restructuring and improving its existing program for pavement system preservation. As part of this effort, SHA revised the process for its pavement management system (PMS) and developed a new software tool to handle the data analysis requirements. The authors present the analysis that led to the development of the pavement performance models of the PMS simulation that forecast pavement condition and prescribe maintenance and rehabilitation treatments. SHA had used hundreds of performance models to accommodate every state region, traffic level, and pavement type, treatment, and condition. To reduce the number of existing performance models, a statistical analysis was performed with the international roughness index (IRI) to identify groups with similar characteristics by pavement and treatment type. Once distinct groups were defined, the authors used a novel histogram-based analysis method to develop performance models based on IRI. This type of analysis was necessary to estimate realistic pavement deterioration rates without regard to pavement age. Independent pavement sections with good correlation were used to validate the performance models developed with the histogram-based analysis. In addition, the network-level prediction of pavement performance yielded satisfactory results with the developed performance models.