Case study on preventative maintenance for asphalt pavements

The U.S. highway industry has seen increasing use over time of preventative maintenance treatments on its asphalt pavements. Performance of the most prevalent treatments employed by the state DOT in the case study -Thin Asphalt Overlay (Thinlay) and Microsurfacing - has yet to be examined in-depth in-situ analysis. This paper describes the data collection process to find the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) of each preventative maintenance site in the state from the last 10 years. With PCI from each site, deterioration curves were generated for each treatment - providing the estimated life extension benefit of each. The analysis then converted life extension to annualized costs to determine which product was more cost effective. Cost effectiveness would be the definitive metric in determining which product is of higher quality.