Optimal Asphalt Pavement Design Considering Cost and Reliability

A typical asphalt pavement design based on the mechanistic-empirical approach offers multiple design alternatives for a given set of input values. The present paper emphasizes the fact that the cost as well as the reliability levels of these design alternatives are different. A simple methodology has been suggested in this paper to assist a pavement designer in selecting an optimal pavement design thickness which is cost effective yet does not compromise the reliability of the pavement design. Pavement design charts have been developed as an illustrative example to explain how the proposed methodology can be considered as an improvement over the deterministic design.