Impact of Pavement Performance Models on Strategic Funding Analyses in the NCDOT Pavement Management System

In 2012, the Pavement Management Systems Group at the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) began a research project with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to significantly update and improve the pavement distress performance curves used in the optimization module of the Pavement Management System (PMS). The incoming model updates caused the Pavement Management Systems group to begin a major evaluation of the decision trees used in the PMS and how they interacted with the new models. This combination of changes greatly altered the outcome of analysis results and, in general, appears to have led to a more accurate representation of pavement behavior for North Carolina's 80,000 center-line mile (128,747 kilometer) highway network. The paper describes the overall changes in the models and decision trees, the impact to funding of those changes to strategic analysis results and how those impacts were communicated to decision makers.