DEVELOPMENT OF FLEXIBLE AND RIGID PAVEMENT MANAGEMENT

SYSTEM
Pavements are major assets of highway infrastructure. Nowadays, Traffic on the roads, in
terms of volume and axle loads, is increasing at an alarming rate. This phenomenal growth in
vehicle population in Chennai is 3.7 million. The increasing high volume of vehicular traffic and
heavy axle loads witnessed on Indian highways have brought the existing road network to a
crippling condition due to the severity of deterioration and distress of road surface which has led
to heavy investments being made to restore and sustain the pavements to the desired
serviceability level. Without adequate and timely maintenance, roads deteriorate excessively,
leading to higher vehicle operating costs, increased number of accidents and reduced reliability
of transport services leading to heavy economic loss to the country. If the road pavements are
assessed and prioritized based on the severity of their distress and maintained to the desired level
at an appropriate time, it is possible to save the losses in road user cost.

In India, the current norms for rating the serviceability of the pavement for maintenance
is based on the roughness index as per IRC norms of SP 16:2004. The main ambiguity in this is
that the severity of the distress is not accounted for. A road may have a large number of distresses
with less severity and may show a high roughness index. Likewise a road with less number of
distresses may have high severity but shows less roughness index. As per IRC SP 16:2004,
priority of rehabilitation is awarded to the road with high roughness index, in which case the
roads with high severity of the distress but with less roughness index would not be prioritized for
maintenance and this could cause a severe deterioration in the near future.

This shows that the roughness index alone is not an exact tool for assessing the distress
condition of the pavement. Thus an indicator accounting all distresses with their type, severity,
extent and density has to be employed to assess the pavement condition for award of
maintenance and rehabilitation works in order to ensure the functional stability of the pavements.
Hence this research is an effort in the same direction to develop a Pavement Management system
to incorporate Pavement Condition Index (PCI) using Geographical Information System (GIS) to
integrate the condition indicators with the spatial road network and to analyze the pavement
sections for maintenance prioritization.