FWD is one of the nondestructive test equipment used for evaluation of pavement structural adequacy, which is usually aided by some backcalculation method of pavement layer moduli. Application of the genetic algorithms (GA) to the backcalculation of pavement layer moduli is discussed in this paper. GA is a relatively new optimization technique and is based on the process of natural selection, peculiar to the evolution of creatures.
It is found that layer moduli of pavement structure can be estimated properly by the backcalculation technique based on GA, and the obtained solutions are more stable than those of the conventional backcalculation methods. Finally, the new backcalculation technique based on GA is applied to the deflection basins measured by FWD in an actual pavement in situ, showing that it gives more reasonable solutions than those by the conventional techniques.