ASSHTOWare Pavement Design ME doesn’t provide any documentation on how to perform a silent or unattended installation (at least not that I can find by searching for the words “quite,” “silent,” or “passive” in the application documention on thier website), but running the installation .exe file with a /? handle produces some interesting results.

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Interesting! There doesn’t appear to be an option to specify license type as “Workstation” or “Education.” In my use case I need a “Workstation” license install, which happens to be the default. Well, let’s try it!

This command should preform a silent install:

"AASHTOWare Pavement MEDesign Installer.exe" /install /quite /norestart /log "C:\Program Files (x86)\AASHTOWare\"

This command should preform a passive or unattended install with progress only displayed in the GUI:

"AASHTOWare Pavement MEDesign Installer.exe" /install /passive /norestart /log "C:\Program Files (x86)\AASHTOWare\"

And what do you know! It works!

I had a previous install with a “Workstation” license on my test PC. So it may have used the default or it may have already had a reg key stored for the license type.

First run still wants to do some setup work.

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After that the application is all set and ready to use! It even wrote out a installation log file to the path specified in the install command:

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Also interesting: the log file is a 37.1MB text file?!

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Quite a log!

Here are a few interesting lines:

MSI (c) (FC:40) [20:26:21:937]: *** RunEngine: *** Product: C:\ProgramData\Package Cache{3D736225-5AFC-404E-A4E4-123155B07E10}v2.6.0\AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design Installer.msi *** Action: *** CommandLine: ****

As if often the case, the .exe is just a wrapper for a .msi file, which the installer leaves on the box here:

“C:\ProgramData\Package Cache{3D736225-5AFC-404E-A4E4-123155B07E10}v2.6.0”

Attempting to extract the .exe with 7-Zip doesn’t work (just produces unusable binary files), but if you really want a .msi the .exe will make one for you if you know where to look.

Something else intesting in the log:

MSI (c) (FC:40) [20:26:21:968]: Command Line: ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT=1 MSIFASTINSTALL=7 DISABLE_WORKSTATION= DISABLE_SITE= DISABLE_EDUCATIONAL= DISABLE_US= DISABLE_SI= REBOOT=ReallySuppress CURRENTDIRECTORY=C:\AASHTOWarePavementMEDesignInstaller2.6 CLIENTUILEVEL=1 MSICLIENTUSESEXTERNALUI=1 CLIENTPROCESSID=12028

These appear to be possible CLI handles to control install behavior possibly with the .msi installer. Looks like you could reverse engineer this to install with a different license type.

These directions were made with Pavement Design ME version 2.6. While not tested, I suspect the same steps will work with recent past and future versions.

Further Reading:
https://me-design.com/MEDesign/Documents.html