Paver Group Tailors Manual For Municipal Engineers

Citing the critical nature of cities’ infrastructure investment, Interlocking Concrete Pavement Institute offers the Distress Manual and Pavement Condition

Citing the critical nature of cities’ infrastructure investment, Interlocking Concrete Pavement Institute offers the Distress Manual and Pavement Condition software to help municipal engineers manage roadway maintenance. In order to know when to maintain street assets, many cities have developed pavement management systems (PMS), typically computerized databases with formulas to estimate anticipated maintenance costs. While the databases provide a means to compare performance among pavements, the ICPI tools can be incorporated into existing municipal infrastructure management systems to optimize their effectiveness.

The Distress Manual builds on experience with the interlocking concrete pavement condition index survey method developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and American Public Works Association. It describes a variety of interlocking concrete pavement defects, divided into three levels of high-, medium- and low-severity. Included are photographs depicting each distress level gathered through site visits across North America and Europe to assist pavement engineers and technicians in field application.

The guide discusses 11 distressed conditions for roads and parking lots, e.g., rutting, cracked pavers, and joint sand loss. Derived from the combined experience of pavement engineers with asphalt and cast-in-place concrete pavements, the ICPI distress survey and condition-forecasting method has been shown to fairly and consistently represent the collective ratings of a wide variety of pavement types.

Interactive effects on pavement condition index value of several distresses are characterized in the Distress Manual using deduct curves that reduce the numerical rating. These values are included in a software model developed to calculate the index on the basis of distress type, extent and severity level. The deduct curves were validated through field inspections of municipal interlocking concrete pavements. More information about the Distress Manual and Pavement Condition software is available at www.icpi.org.