Defects in Flexible Pavements: A Relationship Assessment of the Defects of a Low-Cost Pavement Management System
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Line 75: Table 1: The sequence of the references (PicadoSantos et al., 2004) and (Issa & AbuEisheh, 2017) to be ensured.
Line 91: The sentence starts with “And” which is wrong.
Line 150 and 204: The sentence can’t start as “Whereas” which is wrong.
Line 160: Figure 3: The figure does not include the dashed line, i.e., “mean”.
Among the drawbacks of using box plot technique includes summarizing the distribution of numeric variable for several groups which also means losing information, thus the exact values are not retained. How would you justify using box plot in your case study?
Why does the chi‑square tests do not require assumptions about population parameters nor do they test hypotheses about population parameters?
Mention about the expected frequencies for perfectly independent variables.
Line 200: The author is advised to share the questionnaire while submitting revisions.
For the case processing summary of functional indicators, there have been noticed outliers. Since those seems to be far from the quartile values, would those be considered as potential outliers or not? Justify.
The authors have well defined the box plot assessment for all indicators.
Table 6: From ranking perspectives, bumps/sags are found to have been ranked 1st. Could this be matched to any other region having similar flexible pavement conditions/characteristics?
The PMS system seems effective, the classes have been defined that for a particular range, the model will categorized it accordingly as 1st, 2nd and 3rd. The PMS system addresses the most cost‑effective maintenance and rehabilitation means for each road segment. Authors are advised to highlight on that.
Author Response
Dear Sir
Thanks for the constructive comments. I tried my best to address each comment at my best. I hope the current form of the paper will meet your expectation. thanks
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Too extensive literature review (table 1), not clear and not up to the point. The research gap is not clearly mentioned. The field is well established in the past. There are several basic things in the paper, which make the paper not mature enough to publish (figure 3 along with a reference?). Figure 1 what is the novelty of the study? Table 2-5 can be removed. Figures 5-7 can be simplified. the paper at this stage explains too much well-known information and brings very little advancement.
Author Response
Dear Sir
Thanks for the constructive comments. I tried my best to address each comment at my best. I hope the current form of the paper will meet your expectation. thanks
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is still not mature enough to publish. The author hasn't provided a detailed response and the response at this stage is misleading and not upto the point. The response report does not have clear meaning and references.
Author Response
Reviewer Comment: The paper is still not mature enough to publish. The author hasn't provided a detailed response and the response at this stage is misleading and not upto the point. The response report does not have clear meaning and references.
Author Response: Dear Sir, sorry that our response could not meet your expectations. I did my best to address your suggestions at my best. The paper presents recent research for Pakistan as a developing country because there is no such research conducted earlier for Pakistan PMS. I also did a detailed review for it, which is also evident in it. Previous research did not focus on categories and their relationship aligned with cost. This paper fills this gap in the existing body of knowledge sir. The methodology is presented stepwise and other reviewers also commended it. The findings are also supported by previous findings and validated by a few tests.
