Roads are vital for facilitating the movement of goods and people, underlining their significance in a nation's infrastructure. Pavement design and management play a pivotal role in ensuring road durability, safety, and sustainability. To design pavement, the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design (MEPD) is largely applied due to its comprehensive design and analysis tool that uses mechanistic principles and empirical data to predict and optimize the performance of pavements over their design life. Pavement management systems (PMS) plan post-construction road management by considering pavement conditions, traffic, and other factors to evaluate maintenance and repair strategies based on cost-effectiveness and road quality. However, MEPD and PMS currently operate independently, with pavement design often overlooking maintenance. This study aims to integrate MEPD and PMS for a balanced, cost-effective approach, validated on the Montreal arterial road network, spanning 1,665 km (41% of the total road network). To begin with, MEPD will be utilized to redesign Montreal arterial road pavement considering it as a cold region and vulnerable to climate change. Traffic, material properties, pavement structure, and climate data are key inputs to the MEPD. On the other hand, MEPD outputs include rutting, cracking, and IRI throughout the pavement's design life. The estimation of IRI, the output of MEPD, will be modified to account for actual Quebec Ministry of Transportation maintenance policies. These policies establish treatments by the level of service and pavement distress and define an expected extension to the pavement life. Thus, by incorporating PMS decisions in MEPD, pavement design is modified. The Montreal data used to validate the approach covers four years (2010, 2015, 2018, and 2020) and includes section length, IRI, and PCI measurements. Various design scenarios under different interventions will be studied for cost-effectiveness. Sensitivity to climate scenarios will also be analyzed. It was found that M-E designs outperform AASHTO 93 for most traffic scenarios. While AASHTO 93 might suffice for specific high-volume roads, M-E designs require thicker surface and binder layers (30 mm for low traffic) but thinner base/subbase (150 mm total) to achieve similar performance under current and future climate conditions. This translates to less maintenance for M-E pavements compared to AASHTO 93 designs. Overall, the study will contribute to the field of pavement design and management systems by combining them and finding synergies between them to reduce the time, effort, and costs associated with dealing with two separate systems.
