Alize-Lcpc Airfield pavement, a new software for the rational design of airport pavement

Alize-Lcpc is the reference software for roads and motorways pavement design in France since more than thirty years. It is a rational method, based on the computation of the resilient stresses and strains in roadways by the classical multi-layer elastic linear model. The design is carried out by comparing these calculated values in all the layers, to the admissible stresses and/or strains values which are evaluated according to the fatigue characteristics of the materials (bounded materials) or their rutting behavior due to plasticization (untreated materials and soils), taking into account the cumulative traffic specified for the pavement. In France, the adaptation of the road design approach to airport pavement is now in progress, leading to the development of a specific version of Alize-Lcpc software dedicated to the design of both flexible and rigid airport pavements. This paper firstly sums up the basis of the French rational pavement approach. It describes the possibilities of the new software, which are illustrated by an example of thickness design for a flexible pavement