Current Topics in Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design (MEPD)_Tech Transfer Webinar
Wednesday, December 6, 2023 12:30 PM – 3:30 PM

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Agenda

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Guide for Design of Pavement Structures served as the official pavement design procedure for most state highway agencies (SHAs) for many years and continues to be the procedure used by some agencies today. However, a shift from this empirical design procedure to a mechanistic-based approach has been ongoing for more than 2 decades. This shift was facilitated in 2008 with the publication of the AASHTO Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG): A Manual of Practice (MOP) and the subsequent (2011) release of the accompanying software program, AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design (PMED). The New Jersey DOT is one of approximately twenty SHAs that have implemented PMED. While NJDOT uses the AASHTO 1993 Guide for Design of Pavement Structures for asphalt overlay design, it uses the MEPDG and PMED for new construction and reconstruction design and as a design check for overlay design. The Department has conducted a local calibration of the flexible pavement models using PMED v2.6.1 and has developed Level 1 input files for various asphalt mixes and traffic input files representing different traffic cluster groups.

In July 2022, AASHTO released the latest version (v3.0) of the PMED software, which is a web-based program instead of the desktop-based application. Although this version includes major updates for the design of concrete pavements (e.g., global recalibration of the rigid pavement models, inclusion of a concrete slab interface friction model, and the addition of MERRA climate data), it also features a new user interface and several other enhancements that relate to flexible pavement design. These updates will be of interest to New Jersey pavement designers. The purpose of this webinar is to demonstrate PMED v3.0 and highlight the differences between it and NJDOT’s current version (2.6.1), particularly as it relates to the design of asphalt overlays. The webinar will also cover the creation and sharing of tenant libraries in PMED v3.0 and the use of NJDOT material and traffic input files.

All attendees will earn 3 Professional Development Hours for this webinar.