Abstract

Info

Title:: Nonlinear mixed effect model for airport composite pavement performance prediction

Author(s):: ZHANG Hong; YUAN Jie; DU Hao; 1. School of Transportation, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010070, Inner Mongolia, China; 2. Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China; 3. Department of Geotechnical Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China

Keywords:: road engineering; mixed effect; model; airfield pavement; performance prediction

Abstract:: With regard to the fact that there are few data about airport composite pavement use performance while more data about rigid pavement in China, the nonlinear mixed effect model was adopted and two data sources were combined for parameter estimation, which led to the building of airport composite pavement use performance prediction model. The model’s parameters were estimated and its imitative effect was analyzed based on the data set of the over 60 airports in China. The results show that the heterogeneity originated from panned observation data of pavement use performance can be decomposed effectively, making residual error normal distributed as is assumed achieving the satisfactory imitative result. Nonlinear mixed effect model and jointed estimation method can be reasonable solutions to the problem of partial observation data deficiency, and can also improve the stability and precision of the parameter estimation. The total trend of data sample is got by nonlinear mixed effect model; the performance curve is also achieved. Moreover, compared with the traditional nonlinear regression, nonlinear mixed effects model provides a more realistic prediction.