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Published: 2004

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At hundreds of Weigh in Motion (WIM) stations, State Departments of Transportation collect traffic data every year to support pavement design, to enforce weight restrictions on highways and bridges, and to provide planning data for highway improvements. Reliable WIM data is particularly important to support the procedures in the FHWA Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG). The purpose of the research is to identify and resolve four related but relatively stand-alone problems associated with WIM data collected by NCDOT. Quality Control: After the NCDOT collects WIM data and converts it from proprietary vendor format to an ASCII text format, the quality of the data must be checked. During the quality control (QC) procedures, tests identify incomplete datasets, out of range values for individual vehicle classes, and other possible data problems. Vehicle class and weight checks generate 0.97% and 6.42% anomalies, respectively thus confirming that NCDOT equipment captured reliable WIM measurements. NC Urban and Rural Truck Traffic Profiles: Knowing the type of traffic by vehicle class by highway functional classification is critical to designing, maintaining and paying for North Carolina highway pavements. Thus, GVW plots by vehicle class and highway functional class are very important. The results indicate that in general, the class 5 and 9 GVW plots for all categories of WIM stations show expected trends. These results may be used by highway planners and pavement designers to quickly determine typical truck traffic profiles in the various NC regions and provide insight into NC truck transportation flows. NC vs. University Of Arkansas WIM QC Analysis: Most highway agencies have the data collection and design groups in different units. While a single software solution is not practical, it is recommended to perform two separate processes where the output of data QC meets the needs and standards of the design process. A comparative analysis between the QC meth.