Project Summary
Life cycle cost analysis is a key part for selecting materials and techniques that optimize the service life of a pavement in terms of cost and performance. While the Alaska Flexible Pavement Design software has been in use since 2004, there is no computerized analysis tool available to assist pavement engineers in developing this cost analysis for a given project. Including LCCA in the AKFPD software would be of immense benefit to pavement designers, allowing them to routinely improve infrastructure performance while making more cost-effective use of the design effort. This study seeks to update the current AKFPD program and create a single software package capable of executing the economic cost analysis and structural analysis functions. Upon completion, the project will provide the updated software, a modified AKFPD manual, and case studies with complete analysis processes to help the new user navigate the software. In the past year, the project team developed a new layout for the program. It also added new modules, including “equivalent single axle loads calculation” and “LCCA analysis,” and designed more user-friendly interfaces for two other modules, “Mechanistic Pavement Design” and “Excess Fines Design.”
