Environmentally friendly pavement design integrating multilayer thermo-viscoelasticity into an optimization framework for balancing global warming indicator and economic costs

Cleaner Engineering and Technology, vol. 33, pp. 101274

Abstract

This study presents an advanced Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) framework for flexible pavement design that integrates multilayer thermo-viscoelastic material behavior. The framework automatically optimizes key pavement layer properties, specifically the material type, layer thickness, and number of layers, with respect to two conflicting and weighted objectives: economic costs and Global Warming Indicator (GWI). Pavement performance is assessed during the optimization process, considering the temperature- and time-dependent behavior of the materials. The developed framework is applied to five scenarios, four of them being synthetic, differentiating themselves by their climatic conditions, and the fifth representing a real-life project. Results demonstrate a strong influence of temperature on optimal pavement layer properties, with maximum differences in total thickness of up to 0.39 m and service life deviations of up to 7.48 years depending on climatic assumptions. Compared to a conventional pavement layer configuration chosen manually by a pavement designer, the MOO framework achieved reductions of up to 18.45 % in costs and up to 11.09 % in GWI, depending on the weight values used to aggregate the objective functions. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for thermo-viscoelastic effects in the simultaneous optimization of both GWI and costs.

Authors 4

1. Paul Leopold Aachen chair Institute of Highway Engineering Faculty of Civil Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair and Institute of Highway Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Mies-van-der-Rohe-Straße 1, Aachen, 52074, Germany

2. Quentin Félix Adam Aachen chair Institute of Highway Engineering Faculty of Civil Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair and Institute of Highway Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Mies-van-der-Rohe-Straße 1, Aachen, 52074, Germany

3. João Santos

   University of Twente

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Civil Engineering and Management (CEM), Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente, Drienerlolaan 5, Enschede, 7522 NB, the Netherlands

4. Álvaro García corresponding Aachen chair Institute of Highway Engineering Faculty of Civil Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair and Institute of Highway Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Mies-van-der-Rohe-Straße 1, Aachen, 52074, Germany