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Planning public transport highly relies on the availability, quantity and quality of travel demand data of passengers. In the last two decades, smart card data has provided the opportunity to create comprehensive travel demand data as a byproduct of a fare-collecting system. One important attribute for the planning is the purpose of the trips, which is missing from the smart card data. This research study proposes and formulates a novel method to infer trip purpose in smart card data. Previous methods either lack the concept of trip chains or did not consider both spatial and temporal perspectives of a trip. Firstly, this method discovers relations between the sequence and temporal attributes of trips with their trip purpose attribute by running a clustering method on a rich travel survey dataset (This study only uses public transit records.) that contains all attributes. Secondly, the discovered clusters are labelled and transferred to the smart card data by calculating the closeness of the trip chain of each individual in the smart card data to the clusters. Thirdly, the proportion of relevant land use types near the destination of each trip is utilized to enhance the previously calculated closeness. The proposed method is implemented on datasets from South East Queensland, Australia. Also, two recently published methods were replicated and run on the same datasets to evaluate the proposed method. The results show improvements in the proposed method compared to the existing methods of the literature.

Monotonic Indirect Tensile tests were performed on asphalt concrete mixtures made of two different types of aggregates. Since the environmental condition is a determining factor in propagation of moisture damage, the effects of temperature and aging were also observed. Three levels of temperature including 4.4 °C, 21.1 °C and 37.8 °C were used in testing. In order to consider the effect of aging, part of the samples were aged according to AASHTO R 30-02 (2010). The parameters of fracture energy, elastic energy and dissipated creep strain energy were obtained for dry and moisture conditioned samples. The sensitivity of the responses to testing parameters was investigated using analysis of variance methods and visual inspections. According to the results, common energy responses cannot be used as realistic criteria to evaluate asphalt mixtures’ moisture damage. To overcome the inadequacy of common energy based responses, modi­fied energy responses were defined using conventional energy based responses normalized by specimens’ failure strain. The analysis of variance showed that the modified energy responses can effectively evaluate the mixtures’ moisture and temperature susceptibility. First published online: 01 Jul 2016

A pavement structure consists of several layers for the primary purpose of transmitting and distributing traffic loads to the subgrade. Rutting is one form of pavement distresses that may influence the performance of road pavements. Geosynthetics is one type of synthetic materials utilized for improving the performance of pavements against rutting. Various studies have been conducted on using different geosynthetic materials in pavement structures by different researchers. One of the practices is a reinforcing material in asphalt pavements. This paper intends to present and discuss the discoveries from some of the studies on utilizing geosynthetics in flexible pavements as reinforcement against permanent deformation (rutting).