Sustainability evaluation framework for pavement technologies: An integrated life cycle economic and environmental trade-off analysis

- A framework for economic and environmental trade-offs is developed for pavements.
- The framework evaluates conventional pavements and geosynthetically reinforced pavements.
- The framework accommodates uncertainties due to data limitations at the planning phase.

Sustainability evaluation of pavement alternatives for given traffic loading and environmental conditions has always been a challenging task for pavement designers and managers. Pavement engineers and managers mainly use life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) to make a decision while the recent focus of academic research and regulatory agencies was more on the life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of different pavement alternatives. LCCA and LCA for more recent technologies, such as geosynthetics, have been relatively less addressed so far. Moreover, uncertainties due to inadequate data can also reduce effectiveness of the decision making process during the planning phase. In this research, an integrated LCCA and LCA framework is developed for sustainability evaluation of different pavement alternatives based on an integrated economic and environmental trade-off analysis. The framework can effectively evaluate different pavement technologies, including flexible, concrete, geosynthetics, and their combinations under different subgrade characteristics and traffic conditions. The fuzzy composite programming (FCP) is used: (i) to deal with the uncertainties associated with limited data and vagueness in experienced judgment, (ii) to integrate the results obtained from LCCA and LCA, and (iii) for final ranking of pavement alternatives. For final selection, decision makers can trade-off between cost and environmental impacts over the life cycle of the pavement alternative. The study results indicate that geosynthetics can be used to enhance the pavement service life for low volume roads with optimized cost and minimum environmental impacts.