Resilience Approaches for Pavements and Geotechnical Assets

Extreme weather, increased temperatures, and sea level rise threaten investments in transportation infrastructure. Hence, resilience is becoming an increasingly critical consideration for highway and transportation engineers. National efforts towards more resilient infrastructures begin with a documented commitment and policy. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) issued Order 5520 to establish FHWA’s policy and approach to addressing these risks. Therefore, it is time to discuss incorporation of resilience into the design and decision-making procedures. Pavement resilience is becoming an increasingly critical consideration for highway and transportation engineers. Indications from the United States (U.S.) Appropriation Acts 2020 and supporting Congressional Reports demonstrate a growing expectation that resilience will be directly incorporated into future pavement design, construction, and maintenance processes. Meanwhile, pavement asset managers have already been asked to incorporate risk to natural threats in their state Transportation Asset Management Plans. Agencies across the country, have been concerned about the weather impacts and how to make pavement resilient to withstand the effect. Many states have a number of legislative initiatives directing various agencies to ensure that resilience is incorporated into their business practice. As a result, many agencies across the country have been actively engaged in numerous tasks to address various aspects of design, construction, and maintenance in order to ensure resiliency. Although there are a lot of work/studies/research going on by various entities, there is not much guidance available for the state transportation agencies to address the issue in a more consistent manner. In absence of that guidance, agencies struggle to plan and implement effective measures. This may also lead the agencies to duplicate the efforts resulting in unnecessary wastage of resource and time. This pooled funded project will provide a platform for agencies to share common issues, exchange agency plans with each other and eventually help agencies develop their resilience plan with minimum effort by avoiding redundancies. Since resilience covers a lot of the DOT’s groups, having a pooled fund with all these different focus areas could lead to difficulty in drafting a scope of common interest, which would tend to prohibit coherence in the deliverables. Therefore, various design, construction, and maintenance aspects involving pavement and geotech assets (such as embankments, slope etc.) have been chosen as the focus area of this pooled fund study. OBJECTIVES: This pooled fund study seeks to support and showcase the research, development, and implementation of resilience approaches in the areas of pavement and geotechnical design, maintenance, preservation, and rehabilitations by various state departments of transportation (DOTs). This would also provide platform for the agencies to share ideas and plans related to resiliency that would eventually help agencies to implement their resilience plans without duplicate and wasteful efforts.

Language

  • English

Project

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01878915
  • Record Type: Research project
  • Source Agency: Federal Highway Administration
  • Contract Numbers: TPF-5(512)
  • Files: RIP, USDOT, STATEDOT
  • Created Date: Apr 10 2023 4:50PM