Application of probabilistic approach for predicting pavement maintenance requirement: A case study on ontario highways

In pavement management system (PMS), the time to maintenance is generally estimated based on the predicted condition of the pavement. A deterministic approach is applied in the PMS to estimate the time to maintenance by following the deterioration equation of performance index. However, the probabilistic approach will further estimate the probability of failure over the estimated time to maintenance. For this reason, a probabilistic approach is applied in this study to estimate the probability of failure of pavement based on both overall condition and individual distress. In this approach, the probability of failure is estimated from the distribution of the mean time to maintenance. These mean time to failure or maintenance are calculated from the overall condition of pavement in terms of the pavement condition index (PCI) when the trigger value becomes 65 or less. However, the pavement may expect failure due to any specific distress (if the target value of failure is reached for any individual distress) before reaching the PCI trigger value of failure. For this reason, the probability of failure of each specific distress is also investigated along with the overall condition of the pavement.