Development of Overall Pavement Condition Index for Urban Road Network

Pavements are major assets of highway infrastructure. Maintenance and rehabilitation of these pavements to the desired level of serviceability is one of the challenging problems faced by pavement engineers and administration in the highway sector. The evaluation of pavement performance using pavement condition indicators is a basic component of any Pavement Management System. Various indicators like Pavement Condition Index (PCI), Present Serviceability Rating (PSR), Roughness Index (RI), etc. have been commonly used to assign a maintenance strategy for the existing pavements. The present paper is an effort in the similar direction, to develop a combined Overall Pavement Condition Index (OPCI) for the selected network of Noida urban roads. The study area consists of 10 urban road sections constituting 29.92 km of Noida city. The methodology includes identification of urban road sections, pavement distress data collection, development of individual distress index and finally developing a combined OPCI for the network. The four performance indices viz. Pavement Condition Distress Index (PCIDistress), Pavement Condition Roughness Index (PCIRoughness), Pavement Condition Structural Capacity Index (PCIStructure) and Pavement Condition Skid Resistance Index (PCISkid) are developed individually. Then all these indices are combined together to form an OPCI giving importance of each indicator. The proposed index is expected to be a good indicative of pavement condition and performance. The developed OPCI was used to select the maintenance strategy for the pavement section.