Texas M-E Flexible Pavement Design System: Literature Review and Proposed Framework (0-6622-1)

Recent developments over last several decades have offered an opportunity for more rational and rigorous pavement design procedures. Substantial work has already been completed in Texas, nationally, and internationally, in all aspects of modeling, materials characterization, and structural design. These and other assets provided the technical infrastructure that made it possible to develop the Texas Mechanistic-Empirical (TxME) pavement design system. In the first year of this project, a comprehensive literature review was made to identify and recommend available performance models in terms of rutting, fatigue cracking, low temperature cracking, endurance limit, top-down cracking, and crushing of lightly stabilized base materials. Additionally, the researchers reviewed different reliability approaches used in existing pavement design systems, and the most practical, promising reliability approach was recommended for TxME. Finally, this report discusses the framework proposed for the TxME flexible pavement design system, including pavement structure, material properties, traffic, climate, design reliability, and user interfaces.