Digital management of airport pavement: preliminary achievements on apron areas

Airports typically revolve around two main macro-systems, each characterized by different design and management procedures: land-side area (e.g., terminals, technical facilities, real estate areas), often treated as building structures; air-side area (e.g., runways, taxiways, aprons), handled by pavement engineering standards and procedures. Being regulated by different methodologies simultaneously, the apron interface between these areas poses a significant challenge to engineers and managers. Specifically, airport infrastructures are subjected to repeated cycles of dynamic and/or static high loads applied by the aircrafts’ movements. The management and maintenance of airport infrastructures represent crucial goals for the handler to guarantee precise standards of safety, security and durability of the superstructural asset. Thus, the handler must adopt specific strategies to preserve and optimize the lifetime and mechanical properties of the superstructure, limiting its wearing and potential degradation over time. Therefore, airports regularly collect a substantial volume of remote sensed and non-destructive survey data to support decision-making by facility managers concerning both airport expansion projects and the maintenance of existing assets. Given the intricacy of airport operations, digital environments capable of reproducing the collected physical and mechanical data, monitoring survey reports, and addressing limitations in various asset areas are expected to achieve an improvement in accuracy at land-side/air-side interface, while also enhancing efficiency in planning actions through integrated monitoring datasets management. Additionally, conveying integrated monitoring datasets of different survey techniques in a unique digital twinning model of the apron infrastructure potentially allows a fatigue life prediction for a specific pavement configuration, by calculating stress tensions and total cumulative damage factor (CDF) caused by an expected traffic mix. In conclusion, this study explores the potentials and challenges associated with the digitalization of a multi-source non-destructive testing (NDT) survey conducted on the apron 700 area of Rome’s Fiumicino International Airport, in a land-side interoperable digital environment.