Analysis of Airport Runway Pavement Reliability Considering Temperature Variation: The Case of São Paulo–Congonhas International Airport

Airport pavement design methods typically rely on standard documents, such as those provided by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which assume general climatic conditions. Nonetheless, the temperature between different regions tends to influence the behavior of the pavements, which impacts how stress and strains are distributed within the pavement structure and influence pavement performance and reliability. Furthermore, global warming has required specific analyses of the behavior of infrastructures, such as pavements, regarding the choice of materials and performance needed to make pavements more resilient. This study aims to perform a reliability analysis for a pavement designed by traditional methods combined with the temperature variation, considering the case of São Paulo–Congonhas International Airport (CGH). It analyzed temperature variations across the four seasons. The procedure includes designing pavement, considering the airport’s traffic mix, and performing a Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) to verify the pavement structure’s reliability under temperature variation. The study shows that the total cumulative damage factor computed through MCS is 79% lower than the value obtained using the FAA method. Considering the pavement temperatures at CGH, all aircraft tend to cause less damage than expected. Furthermore, the pavement designed could withstand traffic 2.5 times greater at 95% reliability and 5.0 times greater at 50% reliability when considering temperature variation. These numbers indicate that in Brazilian airports where fatigue is the primary design criterion, the FAA Rigid and Flexible Iterative Elastic Layered software overestimates the damage and consequently increases pavement construction costs. These results suggest that the airport pavement design method requires calibration for Brazilian climatic conditions to improve fatigue damage prediction, especially for airports where fatigue is the primary failure criterion. The limitations of this study should be acknowledged to inform future research. The pavement temperature equation applied is deterministic, assuming fixed values for albedo, wind speed, and atmospheric transmission. Future research should assess the suitability of this equation for Brazilian regions, particularly in relation to actual measured temperatures at pavement depth. In this study, pavement reliability was evaluated considering only temperature variations; factors such as precipitation and variability in pavement thickness were not included, although they may affect pavement performance. Additionally, fatigue tests under different asphalt temperatures were not conducted, and a standard stiffness value for asphalt material was used to assess fatigue behavior. Future studies by the authors will aim to calibrate the performance equations and address these limitations.