Proposing an appropriate alternative for Asphalt Pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation, Using Surface Distress and Roughness Evaluation Indices

Pavement maintenance and rehabilitation is of great importance in increasing the lifetime of the roads which requires a huge finance. Through a pavement management system (PMS), these actions can be proioritized with optimized financial costs. In order to establish such situation, a database is required to investigate gathered information in different periods. As the establishment of PMS in Iran is in the beginning stages and there is no access to a long-term database, planning and proioritization of road maintenance can be effective and operational, considering the current condition of pavements’ defects. In this paper, the surface condition of about 800 km of arterial road network in Kermanshah province is evaluated based on International Roughness Index (IRI) and Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating (PASER). In fact, this paper proposes the maintenance options required for each section based on the pavement condition through the aforesaid indices and their combination. Reviewing the data and their results show that the high intensity of surface roughness (high IRI) does not necessarily mean the existance of surface defects with high intensity (low PASER), and vice versa. Therefore, the combination of these two indices can have more appropriate performance than each of them to show the pavement condition. A regression model is introduced to create a relationship between IRI and PASER which expresses the capability of proper estimation of each index according to the other one.