Modeling the Road Degradation Process: Non-linear Mixed Effects Models for Correlation and Heteroscedasticity of Pavement Longitudinal Data

Pavement deterioration models are important inputs for the pavement management systems. These models are based on the study of performance data, and they provide the evolution law of pavement deterioration.In order to characterize the pavement deterioration process, several statistical methods have been developed at the French institute of science and technology for transport, development and networks (Ifsttar). This paper presents a nonlinear mixed-effects model accounting for the correlation between repeated observations on the same pavement section. Based on this nonlinear mixed-effects modeling, we investigate and test climatic factor that could explain differences in the parameters between pavement sections.