Predicting how a pavement will perform under certain levels of traffic and climatic conditions is extremely important for designers and planners, representing possibly one of the most complicated tasks and certainly the ultimate target of most of the research being done in the field of pavement engineering.
In order to address this research topic, software is being developed to predict Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPPS) that will have the characteristics of being modular and open-source. This is a very large and ambitious project that involves the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge and significant additional funding for some of the detailed model development and programming has been obtained from the New South Wales Road Traffic Authority and the Nottingham Asphalt Research Consortium.
Each module will be dedicated to a particular aspect of pavement design, such as micro-climate, resilient and plastic behaviour of materials, damage calculation etc., and will be designed in such a way to have standard inputs and outputs in order to be interchangeable with other similarly built modules.
The concept behind this design is that this platform will create a community of researchers that will use this common framework to develop, exchange and use modules related to their own area of expertise, contributing to the diffusion and application of knowledge in a much more efficient way than before.
This section describes the characteristics and implementation of novel software for predicting long term pavement performance and is the continuation of the work presented in the previous deliverable of the ASSET-Road project DEL 4.1. For the purpose of clarity it will be appropriate to summarise briefly the reasoning behind this part of the project and the concepts that have led to the current stage of the tool.
Given the very high costs involved during both construction and maintenance phases and the very large environmental, economical and social impact that a road has on the communities that it serves, one of the main challenges that researchers, planners and designers in the field of pavement engineering have always faced is the prediction of how that road would perform throughout its service life under variable conditions of traffic and environment. For this reason in the past decades a number of ever more sophisticated models (numerical, analytical or empirical) have been developed by researchers and practitioners and have often been implemented into software packages of various complexities. These tools can range from a simple analysis of a few sections along the road under some standard load conditions to more detailed simulations of numerous points along the road with dynamic load and environmental conditions updated daily or monthly. It is easy therefore to see how in some cases computational power and efficiency can be vital to the outcome of a project and hence it is not only important to develop reliable analytical models but also to implement them in the best possible way.
As one can understand, software can only be considered as good as the analytical models it uses, and once these become obsolete due to the advancements in the field usually the programs that use them would need to be replaced or updated. In order to address this issue that can be seen as a limitation of the currently available software packages, a program is being developed within the Work Package 4 of the ASSET-Road project to predict Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPPS) that will have the characteristics of being modular and open-source. This is a very large and ambitious project that involves the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge and significant additional funding for some of the detailed model development and programming has been obtained from the New South Wales Road Traffic Authority and the Nottingham Asphalt Research Consortium.
The idea behind this approach is to supply a fully functional software that can be used to design new roads or plan maintenance on existing ones while at the same time allowing users and researchers to modify it in order to implement at any moment in time the models that are considered more appropriate for certain situations. By doing this it is possible to deliver a tool built to withstand the test of time, where advancements in the field of pavement engineering can be applied instantly and new models and approaches can be compared to older ones. The vision is that of a global community of users that will develop new modules for the software and share them online in such a way that the software will effectively become a platform where all new knowledge and state of the art models will be made available to everyone, hence speeding up the dissemination and the adoption of new ideas.
Keeping in mind these main objectives, it is evident how much of the effort in the development of this software needs to be dedicated to the software structure itself. Although the various modules that the software will run have the important role of constituting the most visible part of the software, allowing it to output reliable results since the very first release, they still represent a “temporary” part of the program that will eventually be replaced by new modules designed by the user and plugged on the original framework of the software, therefore the main focus of this research project has been the development of a software architecture that will allow the user to customise every aspect of the simulation in an intuitive way.
For this reasons the next sections will be dedicated first of all to the customisation of the Graphical User Interface and the extension of this concept to a customisable framework, with a glance at the creation of an online user’s community, then to the description of the particular modules employed in the current version of the program and finally to some applications and practical examples.
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