In the freight container yard, large forklifts with heavy wheel loads are introduced to handle large-size containers. Therefore, applied loads on the asphalt pavements in container yards are significantly larger than those on asphalt pavements for usual roads. To investigate the deformation characteristics of asphalt pavements under heavy wheel loads, cyclic loading tests and vehicle running tests were carried out. The test results have shown that the strains to asphalt pavements are considerably influenced by strain rate and tire contact pressure. Those strains were properly calculated by multi-layered elastic analysis, when the effects of strain rate tire contact pressure were appropriately taken into account. On the grounds of that analysis, a new design method for asphalt pavements under heavy wheel loads was proposed.

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