In recent years, the trucking industry has strongly supported innovative tire and suspension technologies that have the potential to improve the efficiency of the transportation network. One of these new technologies uses wide-base single tires instead of a conventional dual-tire assembly. Wide-base tires offer the trucking industry potential economic advantages over conventional dual tires, including improved fuel efficiency, superior handling, braking, and comfort, increased payload, and reduced repair and tire costs. However, while the wide-base tires that are currently available were designed in accordance with current pavement regulations, such as "inch-width" laws, earlier studies on a previous generation of wide-base tires have caused many agencies to conclude that using wide-base single tires would result in a significant increase in pavement damage compared to dual tires. Yet as a result of more than two decades of research following the introduction of the first generation in the early 1980s, wide-base tires have evolved considerably, and a new generation is thought to be comparable to conventional dual tires in terms of pavement damage.

With the recent introduction of the new generation of wide-base tire, pavement responses to different axle configurations were measured at the heavily instrumented Virginia Smart Road . The new single wide-base tire that was investigated has a wider tread and a greater load-carrying capacity than first generation of wide-base tires. Results of the study included an evaluation of potential fatigue and subgrade rutting damage resulting from different tire configurations, including the new wide-base tire and the conventional dual-tire assembly. To extend the scope of the experimental program, a calibrated three dimensional Finite Element (FE) approach was evaluated to accurately quantify pavement damage due to different axle configurations and to expand the considered failure mechanisms to other pavement distresses.