Integrating Quality Assurance in Balance Mix Designs for Durable Asphalt Mixtures: State-of-the-Art Literature Review

Delivering durable asphalt concrete within a reasonable cost is one of the great ambitions of pavement material engineers. This state-of-the-art review article documents the efforts spent in the past two decades to ensure the durability and performance of asphalt mixtures in mix design and production. A perspective with the attempt to integrate laboratory mix design, plant production quality assurance, and field place acceptance is applied in the review. The development of the performance specification and performance mix design is summarized. The paper categorizes performance specification into index-based performance specification and predictive performance specification that include performance-related specification and performance-based specification. The approaches to developing index-based performance mix design/balanced mix design and predictive performance mix design are also compared in the review. The challenges and solutions in incorporating performance tests in asphalt productions are documented and discussed. The challenges include selecting performance testing methods, determining index threshold limits, estimating and incorporating testing variability and uncertainty, determining sampling position and testing frequency, and so forth. The paper also provides suggested areas of future research and implementation activities.