Parametric analysis of the minimum cost design of flexible pavements

This paper presents recommendations for an optimal pavement design. For this purpose, eight optimiza-tion models were developed, each corresponding to a different type of pavement. The optimization mod-els were used to obtain the optimal designs for different design data. These results were used to perform a multi-parametric analysis, from which the design recommendations for an optimal design were derived. Since the optimization was performed for a large number of design-parameter combinations, the manual execution of the optimization algorithm was not feasible. Therefore, the optimization model was developed to include a loop to perform an optimization for each of the combinations. This study dis-cusses the project data in which geosynthetically reinforced flexible pavements outperform conventional flexible pavements. In addition, the results of the study allow a direct comparison between geosynthetic reinforced and unreinforced flexible pavement structures once they are optimized.(c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams Uni-versity. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This paper presents recommendations for optimal pavement design through the development of eight optimization models and the optimization of different design data. The study shows that geosynthetically reinforced flexible pavements outperform conventional flexible pavements in certain project data.