Critical Concepts

The following is a list of concepts that are critical for using and understanding CalME:

•Trial: a collection of design inputs that represent a proposed pavement design for a given project segment

•Project: a collection of trials, a given project segment may have multiple trials

•Simulation: typically refers to the prediction of performance of a given trial. There are two types of simulations: deterministic and Monte Carlo. Deterministic simulation is used to predict the median performance (i.e., with 50% reliability), while Monte Carlo simulation is used to predict the distribution of pavement performance, from which the design reliability is determined. The minimal design that has no less than 95% reliability is the optimal design. For convenience, the number of random samples used in Monte Carlo simulation is referred to as the "number of simulations".