Abstract
One of the major issues in the material-based or acceptance quality characteristics asphalt pavement Quality Assurance (QA) is that the method does not have rationality to link between the individual materials and the projected performance of the pavement. A new asphalt mix QA method has been recently developed under a national research project using the probabilistic Performance Related Specification (PRS). This advanced PRS QA methodology integrates the AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design$^{(R)}$ technology with the simple performance test concept that bridges the material characteristics with the pavement performance. This paper presents a case study of asphalt pavement performance using the developed PRS QA computer program, named Quality Related Specification Software (QRSS), with an actual pavement project, to demonstrate the developed PRS procedure and to assess the robustness of QRSS in terms of the rationality of the distress predictions. The results of this limited case study show that the new PRS QA method reasonably predicts the pavement performance, properly applied the probabilistic methods, and produced rational pay adjustment.