Relationship Between Statistical Distributions of Traffic Loads and Pavement Responses

Mechanistic-empirical design approaches have been developed to predict flexible pavement responses based on vehicle loads and elastic material parameters, but little is known about vehicle load distributions and seasonal changes in these parameters. Analysis of vehicle load and transverse strain distributions suggest a relationship between wheel loads and temperature-corrected strains. It appears that the wheel load distributions and corresponding temperature-corrected strain distributions are normal and lognormal, respectively. Plotting the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 99th percentile values from the load distribution against the corresponding percentiles from the strain distributions suggests a linear relationship between wheel load and temperature-corrected strain. This indicates that a probabilistic approach to traffic loadings may be incorporated into mechanistic-empirical design procedures for flexible pavements.