Modelling of dowels and its interaction with slab in Abaqus

[hunnyahmed12]

I am modeling a rigid pavement using C3D20R elements for the pavement structure. For the dowels, I have attempted two different modeling approaches: using beam elements (B31) and solid elements (C3D8R). To define the interaction, I initially embedded the dowels within the pavement and also experimented with using springs to connect the dowel nodes to the slab nodes. However, my results do not fully align with other FEM software like I-Slab or EverFE. While the results match at the center of the slab, discrepancies appear near the joints, which I suspect are due to improper modeling of the dowel interaction.