Remote Sensing, Vol. 14, Pages 500: Orthogonal Set of Indicators for the Assessment of Flexible Pavement Stiffness from Deflection Monitoring: Theoretical Formalism and Numerical Study (Remote Sensing)

The monitoring of pavements along roads is generally based on the use of indicators directly derived from measurements. More specifically, the bearing capacity of pavements is often simply deduced from either the maximum deflection value measured or the difference between two measured values along the deflection basin. This paper proposes a methodology to define a set of orthogonal indicators adapted to the structure being evaluated. This methodology is presented for deflection measurements recorded on a flexible pavement simulated by the Burmister model and consists of searching the weighting functions to calculate different indicators as linear forms of the deflection bowl. Weighting functions are defined for each indicator in order to maximize its sensitivity to a given structural parameter without being sensitive to the other structural parameters. The paper presents the various steps involved in constructing the indicators. A numerical example of an application shows that variations of each indicator follow the Young’s modulus variations specific to this indicator. Several extensions of this method are also introduced for other mechanical models or instrumented pavements.