Rigid Pavement Analysis System (RPAS): An Enhanced Graphical User Interface
Abstract
In recent decades there has been a significant interest among researchers in developing pavement analysis tools that will work with high efficiency and provide accurate results within a short timeframe. The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) has developed a finite element-based pavement analysis software named “Rigid Pavement Analysis System” (RPAS) capable of analyzing Jointed PCC pavements of any number of PCC and soil layers. The processing core of this software was developed in MATLAB with a pre- and post-processing user interface developed in C++. The MATLAB code is compiled into an executable and together with the C++ interface they are installed by the user as a stand-alone application that runs in Windows. While this combo of tools has worked well, it has limited the implementation of new features because it requires development skills in both MATLAB and C++. For this reason, it was decided that to further improve the usability and development of RPAS a new user interface developed in MATLAB was needed. The work leading to the development of this new interface is described in this thesis. The new interface was developed to have a similar appearance to the one developed in C++ to ease the transition for users already familiar with the previous interface. A series of case studies were used to verify the functionality of the interface. There was no need to implement a full verification and validation of the results since that has already been preciously done. The purpose of the case studies was to verify that the user inputs were appropriately passed to the processing core. This research may have a significant contribution to the field of pavement analysis by providing a new tool that in the future could be accessed through a website without the need for a stand-alone application.
Subject Area
Civil engineering|Computer Engineering
Recommended Citation
Samrose, Samina, "Rigid Pavement Analysis System (RPAS): An Enhanced Graphical User Interface" (2023). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI30637592.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI30637592