Combined Importance Sampling and Transition Probability Matrix Approach to Reliability in an Incremental Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Method

As Mechanistic-Empirical design methods become more complex, trying to deal with the real complexity of pavement design, it is vital that reliability methods keep pace with these developments. However, this complexity also brings an additional computational burden, and so it is important that whatever approach is taken to reliability, it is computationally tractable. This paper outlines an approach, using an Importance Sampling Monte Carlo simulation for the mechanistic component, combined with a Transition Probability Matrix based approach for incremental (and incremental recursive) formulations of the empirical component, that provides a good balance between computational time and complexity, allowing a detailed picture of the performance of the pavement to be developed. Splitting the reliability simulation in this way allows one to use a full range of statistical tools for the empirical component of the design method, making a convenient split between simulation based reliability approaches and statistical approaches. Additionally, multiple failure criteria, typically encountered in pavement design, can be handled outside of the simulation, making the simulation process easier to track. The approach uses the simple nature of probability state vectors to obtain a feature rich indication of the possible state of the pavement over the design life, rather than a single numerical output, making the process more transparent to users. However, simple statistics and other indicators can be quickly and easily extracted from the output. This output is also simpler to interpret and convey than a multitude of graphical traces produced by a typical simulation approach. The drawback of the approach is that is not possible to use this approach for damage or deterioration which is being used in a recursive analysis to drive changes to the structural model.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Lea, Jeremy David
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 87th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2008-1-13 to 2008-1-17
• Date: 2008

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; References;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 87th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Mechanistic-empirical pavement design; Monte Carlo method; Pavement design; Pavement performance; Reliability; Simulation
• Subject Areas: Design; Highways; Pavements; I22: Design of Pavements, Railways and Guideways; I23: Properties of Road Surfaces;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01088864
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 08-2409
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Feb 25 2008 2:36PM