Development of a Flexible Pavement Design Framework for Autonomous and Connected Trucks

Lateral position of loading, which is an important input to pavement design and analysis, is a random phenomenon for human-driven trucks because they do not follow a straight path as they travel. Therefore, in the pavement-design community, this variable has been called “wheel wander” and conventionally considered in an implicit way. However, with the introduction of autonomous and connected trucks (ACTs), this variable is expected to be controllable, using the embedded autopilot and communication technologies. Hence, this variable should be taken as an explicit input to simulate accurately the impact of ACTs on pavement-damage accumulation. This study presents a framework that may improve any pavement-damage accumulation approach to take lateral position of loading as an explicit input. Due to utilization of truncated normal distributions, the effects of lane width and vehicle width on pavement-damage accumulation could be considered in the framework as well. In this paper, this framework was applied on the state-of-the-practice pavement-design approach, Mechanistic–Empirical Pavement Design Guideline (MEPDG). MEPDG’s damage-accumulation equations were reinforced with curve-fitting and function-approximation techniques for explicit consideration of the lateral position. A simple numerical example was presented in the paper to demonstrate how accumulated damage varies with respect to the position of loading.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 43p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01835298
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: ICT-20-010, UILU-ENG-2020-2010
  • Contract Numbers: 69A3551747105
  • Files: UTC, NTL, TRIS, ATRI, USDOT
  • Created Date: Feb 7 2022 9:41AM