An-Najah Staff

The provision of proper transportation services would play a basic role in future development plans for the Palestinian territories. The road network, which forms the backbone of the transportation system in the Palestinian territories, suffered seriously from the constraints imposed on its development by the Israeli authorities. Since the establishment of the Palestinian authority few years ago, limited budgets were allocated to maintain the road network in the Palestinian territories. Therefore, it is necessary to develop and implement a pavement monitoring and management system aiming at identifying the prevailing conditions of the pavement structures, assessing these conditions, and defining the proper corrective measures. The paper highlights the approach which was developed to assist Palestinian decision-makers to evaluate and define the measures to rehabilitate the damaged pavement structures of the road network in the Palestinian territories. First, the paper presents a general background related to road conditions in the Palestinian territories. This is followed by a presentation of the suggested methodology to develop an integrated tool to evaluate, maintain, and rehabilitate road pavements in the Palestinian territories. The paper presents a number of case studies performed for three different urban and rural locations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The paper ends with conclusions and recommendations, which include the need to apply the indicated approach as a first step to develop a comprehensive program for the establishment of a pavement management system for the Palestinian territories. Keywords: pavement evaluation, pavement maintenance, pavement rehabilitation, pavement monitoring and management 

An optimum approach for the design of flexible pavements has been developed which utilizes the anticipated performance of pavement and its life-cycle cost. The optimum approach developed has been applied to the design method recommended by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) for the design of flexible pavements. Pavement performance, defined using the initial and terminal serviceability indices, is a major design parameter that directly affects future pavement condition, initial construction cost and maintenance and added user costs. The optimum design is the one associated with the optimum terminal serviceability index and corresponds to the most cost-effective design. Cost-effectiveness is defined using a parameter called pavement life-cycle disutility which is the ratio of the pavement life-cycle cost to the pavement life-cycle performance identified by the area under the corresponding performance curve. The optimum pavement design is the one associated with the minimum pavement life-cycle disutility value and yields the optimum terminal serviceability index. The optimum terminal serviceability index value replaces the general AASHTO design index recommendations of 2.0 and 2.5 for minor and major roads, respectively. A performance curve is generated for a particular pavement structure using an incremental solution of the AASHTO basic design equation. It is shown that pavements should be designed for higher terminal serviceability index values than currently recommended.