ABSTRACT
The apparent complexity and sophistication of reliability approaches in pavement design has rendered them the exclusive domain of statistical experts, while the rest of the profession remains vociferously polarized and painfully divided. This paper lifts the artificial obscurity of theoretical manipulations by demonstrating that reliability is simply our modern equivalent to good old safety factors, which every engineer can comprehend. This is accomplished by appealing to common-sense engineering and employing simplified terminology. It is discovered that the 1986/1993 AASHTO Design Guide sends the engineer on an impossible mission, with very little guidance as to how to select the necessary parameters. The scarcity of information in the Guide itself, as well as in textbooks and journals, is attributable to the fact that some parameters are simply impossible to determine. Rather than selecting a single value in an admissible range, the engineer is well advised to turn to Monte Carlo simulation, which will elucidate the repercussions of each parameter chosen.
