Performance-Based Design of Highway Infrastructure for Heavy Vehicles

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The proposed research program develops a new, comprehensive knowledge base about heavy vehicle traffic and loading to support performance-based design of highway infrastructure. The impetus for the research arises from advancements in the state-of-the-practice for the design of pavements and bridges, which increasingly requires detailed characterization of heavy vehicle activity. Moreover, given the large and growing transportation infrastructure deficit, there is an urgent need for civil engineers to adopt new practices to improve infrastructure design and the assessment of its performance. While there are a variety of data sources available to characterize heavy vehicle activity, there remains a significant knowledge gap concerning how these disparate datasets may be integrated within a systematic framework to enable development of sufficiently detailed and reliable indicators of this activity. These indicators are the inputs required for performance-based design. The proposed research program addresses this knowledge gap.