A Connected Vehicle Approach for Pavement Roughness Evaluation
Abstract
Connected vehicles present an opportunity to monitor pavement condition continuously by
analyzing data from vehicle-integrated position sensors and accelerometers. The current
practice of characterizing and reporting ride-quality is to compute the international roughness
index (IRI) from elevation profile or bumpiness measurements. However, the IRI is defined only
for a reference speed of 80 kilometers per hour. Furthermore, the relatively high cost for
calibrated instruments and specialized expertise needed to produce the IRI limit its potential for
widespread use in a connected vehicle environment. This research introduces the road impact
factor (RIF) which is derived from vehicle integrated accelerometer data. The analysis
demonstrates that RIF and IRI are directly proportional. Simultaneous data collection with a
laser-based inertial profiler validates this relationship. A linear combination of the RIF from
different speed bands produces a time-wavelength-intensity-transform (TWIT) that, unlike the
IRI, is wavelength-unbiased. Consequently, the TWIT enables low-cost, network-wide and
repeatable performance measures at any speed. It can extend models that currently use IRI data
by calibrating them with a constant of proportionality.