Abstract

Airport pavements are critical to American commerce.  Like all structures, these pavements are susceptible to wear and damage through use and external forces, these factors can cause costly repairs and maintenance to keep the pavement functional and safe to use. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has a number of Advisory Circulars that act as guidance for the construction and maintenance of airport pavements and provide evaluation guidelines and tools to assess their condition. However, when it comes to evaluating pavement roughness, current guidance addresses single-event roughness issues for runaways only. FAA roughness evaluation software, ProFAA, provides airports with a tool to comply with Advisory Circular 150/5380-9. This runway roughness specification provides guidance to the airfield pavement community to address runway roughness issues. However, the technology described in this specification only addresses single-event roughness and is for runways only. The research effort described in this report is comprised of two phases. In Phase 1 of this project, a method was developed to locate and quantify multiple-event roughness (MER) for runways and taxiways using measured profile data only. In Phase 2, the objective was to incorporate that method into the existing ProFAA software. Additionally, this research examines the impact on related guidance and recommends changes to existing Advisory Circulars to incorporate the MER method.

This report describes the MER process, the incorporation of the method into ProFAA, and the impact on related FAA Advisory Circulars.