Prediction of Pavement Crack Initiation from In-Service Pavements: A Duration Model Approach (05-1197)**
Andreas Loizos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Matthew G. Karlaftis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

It is widely accepted that the success of pavement management systems largely depends on the quality of the deterioration models embedded in their structure. As such, large amounts of research have concentrated on developing a large array of approaches to model and predict pavement distress and deterioration. The objective of this paper is to develop surface distress prediction models for pavement failure times (the initiation of cracking on the surface of flexible and semi-rigid pavements) on the basis of a large (more that 1,000 observations) and recent (1998) data set collected from in-service pavements in 15 European countries using the principles of stochastic duration (hazard) models. The results indicate that, as expected, construction, traffic and climatic factors affect pavement distress and that the lognormal functional form, in contrast with the findings of previous studies, best describes the distress initiation process.