National Concrete Pavement Technology Center

Project description

This project implemented additional features into MnPAVE-Rigid, leading to a new version of MnDOT’s rigid pavement design software. The database of American Association of State Highway Transportation Officers (AASHTO) mechanistic-empirical (M-E) pavement design projects was expanded to account for additional design inputs. A new codebase using the Java scripting language was developed to provide MnDOT with direct control over the software. The representation of traffic loads was expanded to use design lane factors and an axle load spectra estimator to reflect truck proportions from MnDOT traffic reports; in turn, new reliability criteria were adopted for traffic volumes. The project effort included sensitivity studies of the AASHTO M-E software for all stages of the project, from investigating new design inputs, to debugging the original damage calculation, validating the database of AASHTO M-E projects, and testing the implementation of new features. The project is fully documented in this final report, which includes a software user’s guide, the database of all AASHTO M-E design projects, and the full Java source code.