Advancing smart and sustainable road construction and maintenance through life-cycle optimisation of concrete pavements

Abstract

Concrete road pavements, particularly jointed plain concrete pavement (JPCP), offer strong potential to enhance the sustainability of the transportation sector and roadway infrastructure. However, current national, state, and local design and management practices remain largely descriptive, emphasising structural performance-based approaches without systematically integrating life-cycle environmental and economic assessments. To address this limitation, we propose a weighted multi-objective optimisation (WMOO) framework, extended with probabilistic and comparative analysis, to enable a systematic and life-cycle optimisation of design, construction, and management of smarter and more sustainable concrete road pavements. The framework supports informed decision-making in pavement construction and maintenance by prioritising reductions in life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and agency costs while maintaining satisfied long-term performance. Case studies of a representative Colorado interstate highway demonstrate that the optimised JPCP can reduce life-cycle GHG emissions by up to 30 per cent compared to conventional design and maintenance practices. Relative to a functionally equivalent hot mix asphalt (HMA) baseline, the optimised JPCP reduces the environmental benefit horizon from 37 to 22 years. Furthermore, the probabilistic WMOO facilitates the identification of robust and generalised pavement optimum design by explicitly accounting for contextual uncertainty and data variability. Adaptable to evolving design, construction, and maintenance practices, the proposed framework provides a practical pathway for governmental agencies and state departments of transportation to advance digital intelligence, sustainability, and the widespread adoption of smart road infrastructure.