Effect of uncertain material property on system reliability in mechanistic-empirical pavement design

This study is devoted to developing an efficient system reliability-based mechanistic-empirical pavement design procedure to address the uncertain material property. This procedure consists of the following four components: 1) mechanics-based layered elastic analysis for computing the tensile strain and the compressive strain, 2) empirical models for predicting fatigue life and rutting life, 3) first-order reliability method (FORM) for estimating the probability of pavement failure, and 4) an updated spreadsheet tool for estimating the system probability of pavement failure. The proposed procedure can efficiently estimate the probability of pavement failure without requiring the engineers to have a detailed knowledge of theoretical mechanics and reliability simulations.