For road authorities in responsibility of road infrastructure design, plan, built and maintain it’s essential to know mechanical pavement and bridge performance and failure in order to develop appropriate and efficient maintenance strategies and calculate and evaluate repairing costs. Road infrastructure construction, maintenance and repair are important factors concerning road network operation and traffic management for European countries and their economies. To have information about the “health” of pavements and bridges there are available several investigation procedures and analytical pavement design methods. Due to complex material behaviour and alternating boundary conditions, structural designs are not sufficiently validated yet and future research is necessary. Another important issue for road authorities is the assessment of pavement performance and bearing capacity using non-destructive methods like deflection measurements preferably on a network level and without disturbance of the traffic flow. WP 4 addresses the protection of road and bridge infrastructure. It analysis, improves and develops the possible important technologies and methodologies to reduce damage to infrastructure, the cost of maintenance and congestion by applying useful and appropriate interventions. A major goal of WP4 of ASSET-Road is the development of low-cost methods of monitoring for road infrastructure, i.e., of road bridges and pavements. The cost of sensors is falling steadily, technologies for data processing, storage and transmission are improving essentially and it is reasonable to expect increases in ‘health monitoring’ of road infrastructure in the future. In WP4, sensors and sensing strategies have been investigated, developed and numerical methods of extracting useful information from sensors and sensor arrays. Future integrated concepts are recommended. Results will be recommended and implemented for different test sites in future. The main objectives of WP4 – Safe and Sustainable Infrastructure were to: * Adopt and improve innovative key technologies and methodologies to improve safety and sustainability of infrastructure * Develop system to predict the risk of bridge overload using WIM data * Develop more accurate predictions of pavement life * Recommend low-cost methods to monitor road and road safety conditions * Pavement maintenance strategies and techniques * Pavement rehabilitation techniques which minimise disruption to traffic * Sustainable strategies and visions for the management of infrastructural assets. The main chapters of this document are structured as follows: * Integrated Pavement Monitoring including state of the art of pavement sensing and sensor specification * Integrated Bridge Monitoring * Pavement Deterioration Models incl. cyclic models for granular materials * Evaluation of recycling technologies and its economy * Optimised infrastructure strategies and visions including road pricing strategies. (Author/publisher)
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