Technical Summary

The Airport Pavement Structural Design System (APSDS) is the leading edge pavement design package for Airports and Heavy Industrial Pavements such as intermodal container terminal pavements.
The unique APSDS methodology rigorously incorporates lateral vehicle wander and state-of-the-art pavement material properties and performance models.

APSDS calculates the cumulative damage induced by the whole traffic spectrum comprising any combination of aircraft types and load configurations.

Any current design methodology can be used.

Easy to use, yet comprehensive

  • The user-friendly menu driven interface runs under Microsoft Windows.

    Most functions are accessible from the toolbar:

  • typical runs take a few seconds on Pentium PC's
  • results in tabular form and report quality graphs.
  • report quality hard copies can be made on the wide range of printers and plotters supported by Microsoft Windows
  • results can be easily exported to other application packages such as spreadsheets for further processing.
  • pavement and loading databases eliminate need to constantly re-key information.

  • results in tabular form and report quality graphs.
  • Sample plot of lateral distribution of cumulative damage predicted by APSDS

Traffic

  • no limit on the number of aircraft types or loading conditions
  • uses
  • actual multi-wheel gear layout
  • wander statistics specified by standard deviation
  • analysis explicitly uses specified spectrum
  • no erroneous short-cuts such as "equivalent" single wheels
  • special loadings such as braking included
  • does not require conversion to coverages

Material models

  • multi-layered pavement system
  • isotropic and anisotropic materials
  • wide range of performance criteria includes all popular models, including Shell and Corps of Engineers.
  • define your own criteria

System Requirements

  • Hardware

386DX, 486DX or Pentium-based PC.
386SX and 486SX PC's require optional numeric coprocessor.

  • Software

Microsoft Windows 3.1 or later and Microsoft Excel for Windows 5.0 or later.

Further details

Click here to view an Overview paper that describes the theory and applications for APSDS  

A short overview paper from the ICAO Journal

 
Calibration to Full Scale Test Data
 
 
Interaction Effects for Multiple Gears

Further Reading

Recent Conference Papers