Dr. Sushobhan Sen, Secretary-Treasurer at ISCP, was invited to deliver a talk at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), India, on March 2, 2026. The talk on ‘A Hundred Years of Rigid Pavement Analysis’ was a historical overview of the topic, celebrating 100 years of Westergaard’s landmark paper on rigid pavement analysis. The talk was followed by an enthusiastic Q&A session and an hour-long discussion with the bright and enthusiastic PhD students at IIT Madras.
Prof Harold M Westergaard of the University of Illinois published a paper, “Computation of Stresses in Concrete Roads”, in the Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Highway Research Board (HRB). The proceedings were published in 1926, making 2026 the centennial year. The paper proved to be the foundation of rigid pavement analysis for over half a century all over the world, only having been substituted with Finite Element Analysis-based solutions in the past two decades. Even today, many jurisdictions across the world use Westergaard’s solutions, and they are taught as a standard part of pavement engineering courses. The paper can be freely accessed via TRB.
Dr. Sen’s talk reviewed Westergaard’s solutions, modifications made over the years, and the development of various FEA-based approaches to overcome their shortcomings. He then discussed work on non-linear analysis of cracked slabs, reviewing ILSL2 developed by Roesler and Khazanovich in the 1990s, and then moving on to more advanced techniques being developed in ongoing research. The talk served as an excellent opportunity for the pavement engineering community to reflect on how far rigid pavement analysis has come in last century, and where it is going in the future.