Fuzzy set approach to condition assessments of novel sustainable pavements in the Canadian climate

Abstract

Since the use of pervious concrete pavement structures (PCPSs) is essentially still in the trial stage in Canada, long-term and quantitative pavement condition data are not available. The existing approaches applied to assess pervious concrete pavement structure (PCPS) conditions are ad hoc and suffer from methodological limitations. A fuzzy set technique is proposed herein as an efficient tool for dealing with qualitative and incomplete pavement condition data on distress types, severities, densities, and weighting factors. Using this method, a comprehensive fuzzy condition index was developed based on Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) methodology and using fuzzy pavement condition data. This fuzzy condition index was converted to a single value that allowed for comparisons of pavement conditions using several ranking techniques. A case study of 24 PCPS sites was utilized to demonstrate how the fuzzy representations of the condition index compared with associated single values. It is shown that this approach can effectively provide extensive condition indices for PCPSs and rank them accordingly, using only limited and imprecise pavement condition data.