Evaluation of Climatic Factors Based on the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide

In this paper procedure for evaluating the effects of climate on pavement performance in Italy is proposed. To characterize the Italian territory nine different simulated scenarios have been used. These scenarios were obtained by combining three different situations of latitude (North, Central and South) with three conditions of altitude (high, medium, low altitude). For each of these scenarios, some configurations, proposed by the Italian CNR road pavement design catalogue with medium and high traffic flow, were verified using the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide. The results obtained showed that the Italian CNR road pavement design catalogue has a limited reliability.