Planning and Design of a New Project-Level Pavement Management System

Pavement design is one of the major activities at the project level of pavement management. A pavement design system takes into account not only material characteristics and effects of traffic and environment, hut also pavement performance and associated economic implications during a life-cycle pe-riod. Other elements at the project level, such as construction quality, ongoing maintenance, and future rehabilitation, are also considered. Therefore, a pavement design system is of-ten referred to as a project-level pavement management sys-tem. The planning and research effort initiated recently by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario to update its pave-ment design system, Ontario Pavement Analysis of Cost (OPAC), is described. Considerable emphasis was directed at investigating the functional and user requirements of the new OPAC. This investigation included the examination of severa