TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 457: Implementation of the AASHTO Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide and Software documents the experience of transportation agencies in the implementation of the 2008 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide: A Manual of Practice (MEPDG) and the 2011 software program, AASHTOWare Pavement ME DesignTM (formerly DARWin-ME).
The MEPDG and accompanying software are based on mechanistic-empirical (ME) principles and are a significant departure from the previous empirically based AASHTO pavement design procedures.