ABSTRACT
Typical pavement Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) are performed using historical climate data to evaluate pavement performance and provide recommendations for budgeting and planning of M&R strategies in the future. However, due to climate change, this assumption may not be appropriate as flexible pavements’ performance is influenced by climate stressors. This study explores the impacts of future climate data and realistic traffic data (RTD) in the pavement M&R evaluation process. A 26-km stretch of Interstate-495 was used to evaluate costs and environmental impacts with varying M&R scenarios and pavement structures. Predicted performance using historical and future projected climate data in combination with RTD is used for life cycle cost and global warming potential estimation. Results show that incorporating future project climate data and RTD can lead to a substantial increase in agency LCA impacts (up to 20% for the presented case-study), the increase is function of pavement structure and M&R alternative.
