Development of a flexible pavement design catalogue based on mechanistic–empirical pavement design approach: Egyptian case study

In many regions around the world, the empirical pavement design methods are the only pavement design choices available to pavement engineers. These empirical methods have several limitations. The Mechanistic–Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) is the latest pavement design approach and is considered an advanced tool to provide a reliable and economic design. Due to its sophisticated and complex nature in terms of the need for a large amount of data input in addition to its constrained availability, the MEPDG is of limited usage in those regions. The main objective of this study is to initiate a procedure to create a flexible pavement design catalogue based on the MEPDG approach and in accordance with a region’s traffic loading, climate, and local material characteristics. This procedure consists of three different tasks. The first task is concerned with establishing the MEPDG data inputs from actual local roadway pavement materials and available regional traffic and environmental information, thence arranging these data inputs in the form of different design combinations. The second task is running the AASHTOware simulations for these different design combinations. The final task is the development of the mechanistic–empirical pavement design catalogue. For each design combination, the design case for which the predicted distresses are within the acceptable performance criteria is selected as a design solution. Accordingly, this research provides a procedure to develop a flexible pavement design catalogue using the MEPDG approach based on the regional conditions. The described approach was applied to the Egyptian pavements, for which a design catalogue is presented.