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We look forward to keeping you up to date on Pavement ME Design (PMED) news, and we encourage you to send us suggestions for articles to be included in upcoming editions of the newsletter. We plan to publish a newsletter each quarter. Enjoy!
Vicki Schofield is retiring after many years of service to AASHTO. She has been an exceptional leader, guiding the PMED Task Force and development team through some major advancements and achievements with the PMED software. The entire staff of the PMED team thank Vicki for her leadership, guidance, and ability to keep the team on track.
Ryan Fragapane is taking on the AASHTOWare Program Manager role for the PMED software. Ryan will be in attendance at the next PMED Task Force meeting in April 2020. We all welcome Ryan to the team.
The integration of the NCHRP 1-52 top-down cracking model into PMED has been completed, along with the alpha testing and verifying the computational methodology. This feature/enhancement has been a high priority of the AASHTOWare PMED Task Force for years, and it will come to fruition shortly. Dr. Robert L. Lytton, with the Texas Transportation Institute, was the Principal Investigator for NCHPR 1-52. The beta testing will be completed by the end of February, and version 2.6 will be released in early March. We want to thank those that have volunteered to be beta testers. Others that wish to participate in the beta testing should contact Chad Becker or Wouter Brink in the ARA Champaign office.
Version 2.6 will be under beta testing later this month and through the month of February. It is scheduled for release in early March. Version 2.6 includes the top-down cracking enhancement from the NCHRP 1-52 project. Licensees can download the software at www.me-design.com.
Two webinars were held this past October that focused on the Calibration Assistance Tool, which was released in early October 2019. The next webinar will focus on the top-down cracking enhancement completed under NCHRP project 1-52. This webinar is being planned for the latter part of March, after version 2.6 has been released. The specific date and time will be announced later this month, so be watching for the announcement.
A special thank you to those who participated as beta testers for the AASHTOWare calibration assistance tool! The calibration assistance tool was released in October 2019 and is being used by multiple agencies.
It is a semi-automated tool that avoids the tedious mathematical computations involved in the model coefficient optimization process. It allows practitioners to opt for re-calibration whenever they notice significant changes in the material, traffic, performance, and spec, etc., without much difficulty. Although the mathematical portion of the calibration is automated, one still needs to judge the quality of data and projects within the dataset.
As a friendly reminder, the Pavement ME Design Task Force is continually taking action to improve the software and welcomes suggestions from users. Suggestions are reviewed and prioritized at each Pavement ME Design Task Force meeting. Submit suggestions to Ryan Fragapane or any Pavement ME Design Task Force member. Feature ideas may now also be submitted through the Pavement ME Design website at: http://me-design.com/MEDesign/Report.aspx.
We want to remind you that there are many resources related to all aspects of Pavement ME Design. A significant amount of research has been conducted in relation to the software and we want to highlight some of these. The MEPDG Clearinghouse is a great resource to see what research has been done by state highway agencies for implementing the Pavement ME Design. Some topics include, local calibration, input characterization, laboratory testing, traffic input collection and many, many, more. Please visit the ME Clearing house website to learn about the research that has been completed in recent years.
The Pavement ME Design task force meeting is scheduled for April 7-8, 2020. This spring meeting will be held in Asheville, NC.
Service units are available for purchase through AASHTO for implementing and using the Pavement ME Design software package. Many state agencies have already purchased several service units, and these agencies can contact AASHTO to redeem them for implementation support.
As a reminder from a previous e-Newsletter, please note that the pavement engineering discussion forum is no longer available for through the AllAnswered website. A new discussion forum location was established at www.engineering.stackexchange.com. The software maintenance team has moved the existing Q&A over to the new site. If you have questions, please post them on the new site with the “pavement” tag.
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