CONCEPTUAL DESIGN FOR A MECHANISTIC RULE BASED SYSTEM FOR HIGHWAY PAVEMENT INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT

The traditional process of pavement condition assessment has been utilized with the purpose of developing pavement management systems. With the modern pavement assessment technology, analysts and stake holders are flooded with overwhelming streams of pavement data. As a result, current pavement management systems started to become statistical data analysis tools and losing sight of the underlying engineering mechanics that play the major role in defining pavement condition. Hence, in this paper a rule based model for pavement assessment has been developed and resented. The developed model is defined as an abstracted state machine with a predefined states connected with sequential logical links that defines the transition from pavement state to the other state(s). Two domains were defined for the pavement states and were built using two types of pavement surface distress, cracks and rutting in conjunction with roughness data. The pavement data was obtained from the Ministry of Transport in Saudi Arabia, for the highway segment connecting Jazan-Jeddah.