Airport Pavement Condition Rating and Maintenance-Needs Assessment Using Fuzzy Logic

This paper discusses the development of a fuzzy logic-based system of airport pavement condition rating and maintenance-needs assessment, and its application as part of an airport pavement system in Singapore. The airport authority had found that its previous pavement condition rating system of classifying pavement distresses into three different severity levels was unsatisfactory for effective pavement maintenance, because each severity level covered too wide a range in terms of extent and density of the distress concerned. The new fuzzy logic-based procedure no longer relies on discrete classification rules, but relates the distress conditions directly to maintenance needs. The concepts of fuzzy logic enable additional information on each assessment to be contained in the form of membership functions. The maintenance management software consists of a fuzzy logic-based micro-computer algorithm that analyzes the pavement condition survey data and computes a maintenance-needs level for each pavement distress. It also serves as a useful training tool for new maintenance crew members.