BACKGROUND

Transportation agencies and industry are continually looking for ways to innovate to improve performance. The quality of highway construction translates directly to performance. The better the quality, the better the performance and greater the life of the infrastructure product. Performance related specifications (PRS) provide a mechanism for agencies to incentivize good quality and recover loss of service life by dis-incentivizing marginal quality in a rational and defensible manner, while also allowing flexibility and innovation. PRS provide a bridge between design, construction quality, and long-term performance and thus, a direct linkage between design expectations and construction quality.

PRS concepts further highlight and emphasize the need for performance tests (PT), while PT demand continues to rise with the introduction of new materials and increased use of reclaimed materials. PT selection ideally should be based on the tests’ ability to integrate mixture design with pavement performance prediction, construction, and acceptance. PT that are more directly related to performance, even when used as a pass/fail screening test, can also provide added value and be used for performance modeling to compare what was designed to what was constructed. It is important to understand PT impacts across design, construction, and acceptance in the quest for longer pavement life. Research is needed to integrate these concepts within PRS efforts; performance prediction capabilities are fundamental to robust and defensible specifications that will ensure long-term pavement performance and reduced life cycle costs.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this research was to develop guides to integrate the performance predictive capabilities of the PASSFlex^TM software and its suite of tools (FlexPAVE^TM version 2.0, FlexMAT^TM, and FlexMIX^TM) within a statistically sound QA system in a PRS framework.