Monitor Activity for the Implementation of a Pavement—Management System at Cagliari Airport

The conditions of airport movement-area pavements play a primary role on safety and regularity of airport operations; for this reason, the aerodrome operator needs to periodically survey their condition and provide their maintenance and rehabilitation in order to ensure the required operational characteristics. To meet these needs efficiently and effectively, the Airport Pavement-Management System (APMS) has proved to be a strategic tool to support decisions, aimed at defining a technically and economically sustainable management plan. This paper aims to investigate the theoretical elements and structure of the APMS; the appropriate methodologies to guarantee a constant updating of the system in all its aspects are presented, focusing on the specific case study of a medium-dimension Italian airport. The article describes the methods and the equipment used for the high-performance surveys and the condition indexes used for collecting and analyzing the data implemented to populate the APMS of Cagliari airport. Two major survey campaigns were carried out: the first in 2016 and the second in 2019. Both surveys were carried out using the same subdivision into sample units, following the ASTM D5340-12 criteria, to correctly compare data collected in different years. In order to sufficiently populate the APMS database, the measured and back-calculated data were stored and integrated using daily acquired pavement reports since 2009 and stored with the specific intention to develop customized decay curves for Cagliari Airport pavements. Preliminary results on the sustainable use of the APMS were reported even with data collected in a limited period and successfully applied to runway flexible pavement.