Probabilistic prognosis of fatigue crack growth for asphalt concretes

• The particle filtering method is applied to fatigue crack in asphalt concretes.
• The growth of the fatigue crack is evaluated by the viscoelastic J integral.
• The prognosis of the fatigue crack in various conditions is presented.
• The method is compared to the widely used classical Bayesian updating method.

A probabilistic approach is presented for the prognosis of fatigue crack growth for asphalt concretes using the particle filtering method based on Bayesian theory. The random response of fatigue behavior is successively updated with the accumulation of the measured data by the particle filtering method. During the updating, particles with high probability are reproduced more, while others are eliminated via resampling procedures. The J integral is adopted for the fatigue crack growth to take into account the viscoelastic characteristics of asphalt concretes. The prognosis of fatigue crack growth and remaining service life under different conditions is presented using this method.