ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Significant progress has been made in research on environmental Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of pavements. Use of this new knowledge has been slowed by a lack of standardized datasets and analysis protocols. Several software packages have been developed to address this by providing datasets with broader coverage and better quality, but practitioners need application-specific data input interfaces for easy use. The authors report work on developing a protocol for environmental LCA of flexible pavements that uses a proprietary software system with data input interface plug-ins they developed for each of the five flexible pavement life-cycle phases. This protocol allows designers to integrate environmental LCA with Life-Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) to select the optimum design from several alternatives. With looming transformative changes in pavement materials and technology landscapes, this protocol also has the potential to allow a more effectively holistic assessment of such novel systems.
