Recommended Selective Maintenance and Rehabilitation Treatment Approach for Air Force Primary Rigid Runway Pavement Systems

The Air Force is facing the challenge to preserve the current inventory of 154 million square yards of paved airfield assets while at the same time reducing the budget by $36.2 billion between fiscal years 2015-2019. This research sought to determine a selective maintenance and rehabilitation treatment approach that allocates resources efficiently to preserve the degrading pavement assets in the financially constrained environment. Air Force pavement inspection reports from the past five years provided 4289 observed pavement distress data points for this research. The data was inputted into the pavement management software, PAVER, to calculate the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) deduct values for every pavement distress combinations. A pavement distress prioritization list was created from the 111 PCI deduct value calculations to rank the impact that different distresses have on the condition of pavement systems. The analysis led to the recommended selective maintenance and rehabilitation treatment approach of treating all medium and high severity joint seal damage with joint seal repair, repairing all pavement slabs with slab replacement that had a PCI less than 70 and with a PCI deduct greater than 10, and using all remaining resources on the Air Force recommended treatments. The recommended approach minimizes the potential of Foreign Object Damage, uses corrective measures in the form of slab replacement to repair the worst conditioned and highest priority slabs, and reduces further pavement degradation with the Air Force recommended treatments