Innovations in pavement design and engineering: A 2023 sustainability review

Abstract

Transportation infrastructure is essential to a nation's everyday life and economic activity. Accordingly, pavement design and engineering are imperative to ensure safe, comfortable, and efficient transportation of goods, services, and people across countries. Pavements should be designed to be adaptable to changing traffic inputs and environmental conditions and always strive to fulfill the requirements of the end-users, including safety, durability, comfort, efficiency, sustainability, and cost. This review highlights innovations in paving technologies with a focus on sustainability from a socio-technical perspective; the scope is meant to be comprehensive but not exhaustive. The discussion categorizes paving design and technology innovations into two high-level sections: 1) high-volume urban pavement innovations and 2) low-volume rural pavement innovations.

Keywords

• Sustainable pavement
• Triple bottom line sustainability
• Pavement innovation
• Socio-technical design