Pavement Performance Evaluation and Maintenance Decision-Making in Rwanda

Rwanda is one most developing country of East Africa Countries (EAC), every year has a great development in different areas. Regarding to infrastructure sector there is a great change in terms of housing, traffic (vehicles, trucks), etc., and when every day traffic loads and pavement age both increasing, it will gradually deteriorate and decrease functional and structural performance of a pavement. Deterioration of pavement can be attributed to various factors like age, traffic, environment, material properties, pavements thickness, strength of pavement as well as subgrade properties which affect the mechanical characteristics of a pavement. This research was conducted in order to assess the effect of Truck & Other heavy vehicles (CVPD), California Bearing Ratio (CBR), precipitation, pavement age and thickness factors on deflection and International Roughness Index (IRI) to find out which factors could be used in pavement performance evaluation in Rwanda as predictor variables and to assess the correlation between those variables. The result shows that precipitation and CBR found to be a significant predictor for both deflection and IRI on Rwandan flexible pavement performance and CBR is strongly correlated with precipitation. Therefore, the climate input precipitation was found to be more important factor for predicting different pavement performance in Rwanda, for further studies the temperature and Pavement Condition Index (PCI) need to be collected and analyzed, then the results would be compared to support the greater effectiveness of decision making and program development for Rwanda pavement performance evaluation.