2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Pavement Management Systems (PMS) is a new course offered in the Department of Civil Engineering at College of Engineering at Rowan University. The objective of the course is to provide a thorough understanding of the pavement management process and integrate the concepts of life cycle cost analysis in decision making process. The PMS course includes the following: 1) assessment of condition of pavement, measures of pavement quality, structural capacity evaluation and rehabilitation and maintenance alternatives based on pavement performance data; 2) different approaches to analyzing data at project and network levels were also discussed, and 3) process of evaluating structural capacity of pavement systems were also explained along with pavement preservation strategy depend on existing pavement conditions. This course is an elective course for seniors, masters and doctoral students in civil engineering, with interest in transportation and pavements. There were seventeen undergraduate, nine graduate and two part time students in the class. The course was divided in two parts; the first part of the course covered the concepts of pavement management systems, pavement performance prediction models, and routine preventive measures for minor rehabilitation. In the second part of the course, all students in groups of two or three, were required to do a class project and discuss them in class on weekly basis, which required them to apply the concepts learnt from this course considering global diversity and applying Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) data. The goal of this paper is to disseminate to instructors in other universities a methodology and some of the optimal practices (or strategies) that the instructor successfully employed in a data driven project based course. Generally, it was observed that these practices made the course more interesting and provided a better appreciation of pavement condition assessment in this course. The detailed course outline, assessment of the different projects, and coarse evaluation is presented.