AN APPROACH FOR PREDICTING LATENT INFRASTRUCTURE FACILITY DETERIORATION

A pavement deterioration model predicts the performance of a pavement over time as a function of traffic, pavement characteristics and envir onmental factors. The most important performance characteristics of a pavement are its ability to bear traffic loads and its ability to prov ide a smooth ride. However, there is no unambiguous approach to direct ly measure these performance characteristics. Therefore, we consider p avement performance to be unobservable. The problem of designing pavem ent deterioration models is the problem of defining the above unobserv able characteristics in terms of what is observed, i.e., in terms of m easured extents and severities of different damage components. The met hodology presented in this paper describes a statistical technique to estimate latent pavement performance from observed pavement damage. No constraints are placed on the number or type of measurements required , so the methodology is flexible enough to include different measureme nt techniques and data collection strategies. The estimation procedure simultaneously fits a deterioration model and a performance index cal ibration model to data, thereby producing much better fits to data tha n traditional deterioration models. The methodology presented in this paper will be useful for deriving more realistic predictive models of pavement deterioration and for defining better data collection strateg ies.