How Weibull apply in Highway

[rsoto]

I searching info about, how can I apply the Weibull distribution on highways, It´s a new concept apply on the desing of Highways in Mexico. My thesis about this topic,until today can´t find info in the web
I really need the info.
Thanks

[Tarik]

The key point for using Weibull is that you have to identify scenarios that can have a ‘failure’. A failure can be a wide variety of things. For example, a car failure, or from the financial field, a person failing to pay his/her loan, or in biology, death or a kidney failure.

A ‘failure’ event has to be dependent on ‘time’. For example you say a car failed after 1000 hours of operation. However, ‘time’ could also mean cycles, kilometers, shots, trials…etc.

Weibull is used to model these kinds of data and to obtain useful results such as estimates of reliability, prediction of number of failures, Mean time to failure… etc.

So now after I have given you a general description about what type of data Weibull can handle, the question that you need to ask yourself is what constitutes a failure in what you are studying?

I can thing about a few examples, such as failures of the road state. For example you could study a section of a highway and collect data about how many times you had to fix the road, “this is can be considered a failure”. You might also consider studying the light system failures.

Another application of Weibull could be the analysis of degradation. For example, you might measure the thickness of the asphalt (gravel) in the highway over time and model the degradation and predict when that the thickness would reach a critical point, so you can fix the road before it causes a danger to the drivers or before the fixing cost becomes very high.

I hope those pointers will help go in the right direction. And remember that you can come back to this forum once you have formulated what you want to study.

Good luck with your thesis