Miaomiao Zhang
CEE doctoral student Miaomiao Zhang, studying under Edwin G. Burdette Professor Baoshan Huang, recently won first place for the the Long-Term Infrastructure Performance Student Data Analysis, which is a student competition run by the Federal Highway Administration that encourages college students to use pavement or bridge monitoring data to study the various factors that affect their performance.
The goal of the competition is to apply high-quality pavement performance data using appropriate research methods to derive recommendations for highway agencies and help them make informed decisions in pavement projects. All data are collected from the Long-Term Pavement Performance program, which is the largest and longest-lasting pavement monitoring program in the world.
Zhang, whose research concentration is in asphalt pavement inspection and maintenance, evaluated the effectiveness of different asphalt pavement preventive maintenance treatments and developed a predictive model for post-treatment pavement roughness.
“The predictive model is sufficiently simple and easy to interpret, while having good predictive performance,” she said. “In addition, a nomogram is provided to help highway agencies manually obtain the predicted values of post-treatment roughness and make better preventive maintenance decisions.”