PaveXpress is an online, free-to-use pavement tool that is designed to assist those involved in the design and construction of asphalt pavements. It was designed by the Asphalt Pavement Alliance and Pavia Systems Inc. and developed by the National Asphalt Pavement Association (NAPA) in partnership with The Asphalt Pavement Alliance, Asphalt Institute and the State Asphalt Pavement Associations.
PaveXpress was created to help address an explicit need in the community to have a modern, easy-to-use tool to help perform pavement design. It’s a tool to help users create simplified pavement designs using key engineering inputs based on AASHTO 1993 and 1998 pavement design process. With PaveXpress, you can take and perform pavement designs as well as validate those pavement designs using industry standards and best practices.
PaveXpress software allows design for flexible and rigid pavements, asphalt overlays, porous sections and parking lots. Over the years, PaveXpress has evolved based on user feedback. Initially starting with only performing new designs with flexible and ridged pavements, it is now moving into things like rehabilitation designs using both condition surveys and NDT and bringing in the most recent cost and life-cycle elements. Life-cycle cost analysis is one of the tools by which different pavement structures are evaluated. The life-cycle cost of a road includes considerations such as the initial cost of construction of a road, anticipated maintenance costs over its lifetime and the costs to users for their delays during maintenance and reconstruction. It contains a module that can give a simple material cost estimate for the pavement materials. The module is not detailed enough for use by bidders for contract estimation purposes but can be a tool for agencies and consultants to get a rough idea of pavement material costs.
PaveXpress also contains a module that can analyze a pavement structure using a more mechanistic type of methodology, which considers the material properties for a given pavement cross-section, the anticipated stresses induced by the traffic loading and the response locations on the pavement surface and at the selected points within the pavement structure. The user is allowed to select an analysis regarding the type of transfer functions to be used, which results in an estimate of the number of loads to failure.
The process for the design using PaveXpress is on a step-by-step basis. As a designer, you have many options to choose from in the design, new full-depth asphalt, new full-depth concrete, asphalt overlay over existing asphalt or an asphalt overlay on concrete or composite pavement. PaveXpress has a resources function page that is helpful with the design process, which includes videos on how to use PaveXpress step-by-step, DOT links, local Asphalt Pavement Association links, backgrounds, local practices, guidance and many others. PaveXpress requires the designer to select the type of roadway the pavement is being designed for interstate, regular highways or arterials, local roadways or residential streets. Default values in some of the areas of the program are automatically populated based on the type of roadway the designer selected. However, any value can be easily overridden to fit the designer’s needs or local specifications. During your design process, you can create many different scenarios and compare them to each other, along with sharing and printing capabilities.
PaveXpress is an excellent tool for pavement thickness design which duplicates the analysis of the AASHTO 1993 pavement design guide for asphalt and the 1998 supplement for concrete. PaveXpress is a non-biased design tool. The procedures are not based on asphalt design approaches but on AASHTO and university design processes. The application was developed to fill the void left by Darwin at no cost to the user. Interactive help was incorporated to assist the user through each step in the design procedure for asphalt and concrete pavements.
