Use of Pavement Management System Data to Enhance Pavement Performance Specifications in Canada

Most agency materials and construction specifications for pavement rehabilitation and construction activities provide little or no linkage between quality assurance methods and the in-service performance of the treatment. The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO), Canada, is developing and implementing performance specifications to bridge this gap. MTO defines performance specifications as specifications that describe how the finished product should perform over time. This paper describes how MTO used historical pavement management system data to assess performance sensitivity and to create historical performance distributions and how the agency used these distributions to set acceptance criteria, including payment adjustment for performance.