Automated Vehicles: Contribution of Flexible Pavement Layers' Characteristics to Rutting Performance

Abstract

Design and implementation of appropriate road infrastructure for automated driving technologies in the era of coexisting automated vehicles (AVs) and human-driving vehicles (HDVs) is one of the crucial issues among researchers and road practitioners in recent years. From the pavement structure point of view, it is necessary to investigate the pavement performance subjected to the various loading distribution scenarios induced by different lateral movement patterns of AVs. This study considers two potential wander modes (i.e., zero and uniform) for AVs in both segregated (i.e., lanes with 100% AVs) and integrated scenarios (i.e., shared lanes for AVs and HDVs). It is known that the pavement layers' thickness and material influence pavement performance. This study used a finite element method (FEM) to consider the AVs' loading distributions and simulate the rutting performance of a full-depth flexible pavement structure constructed by different layers' thicknesses and materials. The results of this study showed that the contribution of the layers' thickness and material depends on the implemented lane distribution scenario and the AVs' wander mode. For instance, improving the layers' material and increasing thickness could decrease the pavement rutting damage in segregated scenarios compared with the reference scenarios (i.e., only HDVs). However, in the case of integrated scenarios, this is only influential when using zero-wander mode for the AVs.