Improvement of pavement mechanistic-empirical design (PMED) virtual weather station interpolation model using radial basis function - Tennessee case study

Pavement Mechanistic Empirical Design (PMED) allows users to create Virtual Weather Stations (VWS) in locations where no nearby weather stations exist. VWS quality has faced several critiques through its implementations in PMED. PMED adopts the gravity model in its VWS creation process. MATLAB codes were used in comparing the error convergence of the gravity model interpolation technique and that by a Radial Basis Function (RBF). RBF interpolation showed very fast error convergence with the increase in number of interpolation data as compared to the gravity model. Contour plots emphasized the quality of interpolation where the RBF model produced well defined contours with a wider range of output than the gravity model. PMED software was used for further assessments of the quality of its VWS and RBF VWS considering climatic summary and pavement predicted distresses outputs. In most cases, the RBF VWS outperformed the current PMED VWS outputs.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Author dc:creator

• Msechu, Kelvin J

Contributors dc:contributor

• Onyango, Mbakisya; Ghasemi, Arash
• Owino, Joseph; Fomunung, Ignatius; Wu, Weidong
• College of Engineering and Computer Science

• Mathematical Modeling
• Pavements
• Radial basis functions

Licence

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language

English, eng

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholar.utc.edu/theses/713

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.utc.edu:theses-1882