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Risk Analysis And Reliability Improvement Of Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design, Xingqiang Danny Xiao

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Reliability used in the Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) is a congregated indicator defined as the probability that each of the key distress types and smoothness will be less than a selected critical level over the design period. For such a complex system as the MEPDG which does not have closed-form design equations, classic reliability methods are not applicable. A robust reliability analysis can rely on Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS). The ultimate goal of this study was to improve the reliability model of the MEPDG using surrogate modeling techniques and Monte Carlo simulation.

To achieve this goal, four tasks …