Institute for Transportation

About the research

Significant progress has been made in the last 20 years in the understanding of the planning, design, construction, and materials associated with pavement preservation activities. Pavement preservation has become important to state work schedules in order to maintain their road infrastructure in good condition. Even when preservation is a routine element in an agency’s infrastructure management program, the process of selecting which roadways to treat, which treatments to apply, and when to apply them may be far from routine.

In order to coordinate these efforts, FHWA in partnership with AASHTO, published the “Transportation System Preservation Research, Development and Implementation Roadmap.” This document was created through the collaboration of state, provincial, and local government agencies, industry and academia in three regional, multi-day workshops in 2007. The workshops identified gaps in knowledge in pavement and bridge preservation and the research necessary to fill those gaps. Projects were ranked according to their perceived necessity and available funding. The goal was to provide a document that could guide future research efforts and avoid duplication of efforts, thereby conserving limited research funding.

The objective of this project is to advance a pavement preservation research roadmap that will guide pavement preservation research efforts in a productive and non-duplicative manner. The updated roadmap will reflect the significant changes that have resulted from the transportation authorization legislation Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21) and the subsequent Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. The research roadmap will identify priorities, gaps, and overlap in ongoing and proposed research and build on the priorities of the FHWA Preservation Expert Task Group.