Highlight on the Wisconsin DOT

September 26, 2023

The Wisconsin DOT (WisDOT), as many other State transportation agencies, has been a long-time user of the empirically-derived AASHTO Guide for Design of Pavement Structures for selecting new and rehabilitated pavement design treatments. In the past several years, however, an effort has been underway by the DOT to evaluate a transition to use the AASHTOWare PMED program.

This effort began with an initial local calibration of rigid and flexible pavement distress transfer functions for PMED version 2.3. WisDOT sponsored multiple studies to measure the layer properties and other inputs for designing flexible and rigid pavements using “best available” data. The outcome from these research studies was the creation of input libraries for import into the PMED software for modeling pavement designs. More recently, WisDOT commissioned a verification analysis of the PMED rigid pavement design, using the web application 3.0 version, to determine the need for local recalibration of the transfer functions.