Construction and maintenance of road pavements are both expensive and environmentally unfriendly. The prolongation of pavement life can reduce material consumption and produce a cleaning effect. This study attempts to propose a lateral control scheme for autonomous vehicles that aims at maximizing pavement life. In the key unit of the scheme, the trajectory-oriented method and fatigue damage-oriented method were compared that would be applied to assign vehicle lateral positions. The simulation of a specific pavement structure had been conducted to calculate the fatigue damage growth with the lateral control scheme. The comparison among different methods revealed that fatigue damage-oriented method performs best. Using the fatigue damage-oriented method, fatigue damage growth decreased by 28% when trucks were 100% autonomous vehicles. Besides, the fatigue damage oriented method was found to be insensitive to the autonomous vehicle proportion higher than 20%. The example of dealing with two lanes situation suggests this scheme was also suitable for minimizing the fatigue difference caused by vehicle volume difference on two lanes.
