Development of software for rigid pavement thickness design

Abstract

Rigid pavement is frequently misunderstood form of construction. Many people assume that rigid pavement is costly and not effective. However, it has been proven that it is good in term of the strength and durability to cater high traffic load compare to flexible pavement. However, in order to have good rigid pavement, the design procedures of the pavement should be properly applied. The vital issue in pavement design is thickness. There are two main approaches of design the rigid pavement thickness which are Portland Cement Association (PCA) method and American Association of States Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) method. However, both methods are difficult to conduct manually and may produce inaccurate result. The difficulties can be expressed in term of time consuming and tedious calculation. Hence, it is very important to computerize the methods in order to make it more accurate and quicker. Although there are available software in the market but the software may not be user-friendly enough. It also does not allow the user to compare between methods. Generally, both methods have their own concept but there are still several same parameters considered. Therefore, the significance comparison between both methods can be done to select most economical pavement thickness design. Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 was the tools used to develop the new software. Software named as AnP Pave was successfully developed. Moreover, based on the verification result there are only small difference between the software and manual calculation. However, an improvement needs to be applied to make the software capable to design pavement reinforcement and produce printable design report.