Integrating thermo-viscoelasticity into an Optimization Framework for economically and environmentally sustainable flexible Pavement Design

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive framework for optimizing flexible pavement designs by balancing environmental impacts and economic aspects while ensuring that the designs comply with thermo-viscoelastic stability. The framework comprises five components: a material database, design variables (layer properties), two objective functions that account for the environmental impact and economical aspects related to the pavement life cycle phases ranging from material extraction to construction, a genetic algorithm-based optimization solver, and two constraints. Two case studies were considered to demonstrate the influence of temperature effects on the optimization of pavement designs, with Case 1 assuming seasonal temperature vari-ations and Case 2 assuming a constant temperature in the top layer. The results show that accounting for tem-perature effects increases required layer thicknesses.