Pavement Deterioration Modelling for Urban and Rural Roads Using HDM-4

India’s growing demand for adequate maintenance and upkeep of the world's second-largest road network of 5.89 million kilometers is a major problem for road administrators and policymakers. To address the issue of proper upkeep of road networks, many countries have implemented a robust pavement management system (PMS) to handle the tasks related to pavement maintenance and management. The Highway Development and Management (HDM-4) system is widely used as a tool for highway investment and maintenance planning and programming. The broad objective of this study is to develop pavement deterioration models for cracking, ravelling, potholes, rut depth, and edge break using non-linear regression techniques in MATLAB and compare them with the models present in HDM-4 and observed deteriorations for their effectiveness. The deterioration models for urban and rural pavement sections have been developed based on the large volume of field data collected in the Jaipur district of Rajasthan State using automated as well as manual methods of field evaluation. These sections were continuously monitored for 5 years for the pavement surface condition data. The validity of these models and calibrated HDM-4 models was assessed by examining the distress predictions generated by the regression models and calibrated deterioration models to the distress observed on the selected pavement sections. The proposed pavement deterioration models and the calibrated HDM-4 models are likely to apply to other developing nations with comparable traffic patterns, soil types, meteorological conditions, terrain kinds, and pavement composition as well.