Cost-effectiveness of performing field investigation for pavement rehabilitation design of non-interstate routes

Many state transportation agencies are faced with making pavement rehabilitation decisions for roadways annually. Their design choices affect the future performance and maintenance cost of those pavements. This study determines if it is cost-effective to perform a field investigation (e.g., FWD, coring) for non-interstate routes to identify pavement structural and functional characteristics at the design stage and whether this information can aid in determining the most appropriate design for rehabilitation. To this end, field investigations are performed on 16 actual roadways (non-interstate routes) in the state of South Carolina prior to their rehabilitation, and an analysis was performed to compare the life-cycle cost between rehabilitation designs with and without field investigations. The results indicate that (1) the rehabilitation design with field investigation tends to produce a pavement that has the necessary depth and made up of higher strength materials that bring the pavement’s SN closer to the required value, (2) the rehabilitation design with field investigation defers the maintenance cycles, and (3) performing field investigation is cost-effective, particularly for those pavements that do not need maintenance treatments until their present serviceability index falls to a 2.