SEOUL, Republic of Korea - ERDC Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory’s (GSL) Carlos Gonzalez and Mary Adolf of the USACE Transportation System Center in Omaha, Neb., recently traveled to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) Far East District in Seoul, Republic of Korea, and to the Japan District at Camp Zama, to conduct two training workshops on the use of the Pavement-Transportation Computer Assisted Structural Engineering (PCASE) pavement design and evaluation software package.
The workshop was conducted for district facility engineers, Department of Public Works personnel and Air Force engineers and consultants. The Far East and Japan Districts, as well as other districts and federal agencies, make use of PCASE to design and evaluate airfields and installation roads and streets.
PCASE is a software program that incorporates all transportation criteria into a user-friendly computer format for designing and evaluating transportation systems. It allows users to take a series of measurements on existing pavement, such as depth, material, age and other criteria.
The information is entered into the program, and PCASE can then project lifespan, load capacity, and number of vehicles that can use the structure during a given number of years before the structure begins to deteriorate.
“PCASE was originally developed for the military, but it has been evolving from the military use, branching out to civilian usage and even overseas,” said Gonzalez. “A great many of the improvements we make come from these workshops. The attendees give us feedback on how they use the program, or ask for modifications or additions to allow them to use it in a certain way and we try to incorporate those changes.” The PCASE team at GSL developed the system to allow research to be translated into a set of scalable and reusable software components.
PCASE software is available to the public at no charge. All that is required to begin is a personal computer. By incorporating recent enhancements in information technology, such as the internet, personal computers and the like, PCASE allows technology transfer at far less cost and with wider distribution than available in the past. ERDC-developed technology continues to provide innovative solutions for making the world safer and better.