Abstract
In most countries local roads (i.e., urban and rural) form over 80% of the entire road network and constitute the country's largest asset value. In order for local roads to remain fit for purpose and maintain their value, they require periodic maintenance. To make the best use of scarce maintenance resources, road maintenance needs to be preventative which requires the condition of the road to be assessed periodically. Traditional road surveys suffer from the lack of repeatability and reproducibility, are high cost and time consuming. This work proposes a vehicle mounted point laser system for the automated, rapid and inexpensive measurement of a major mode of local road deterioration, namely fretting. Compared to other technologies such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), visual sensors and the Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) system, the point laser requires less computational power, is less sensitive to the surrounding environment and is of comparatively low cost. A robust approach is proposed which consists of a number of pre-processing algorithms to deal with noise and the effects of the vehicles dynamic motion, and a signal processing algorithm which analyses histograms of the distance from the road surface measured by the laser to account for changes in road texture. Road fretting measured by the proposed system on a variety of roads is compared with fretting determined using a standard visual assessment process. The results indicate that the proposed system can measure road fretting to the levels of detail which are suitable for planning, programming and preparations road management functions.
Highlights
The benefits of well-maintained road networks in terms of economic and social development have been recognised for many years [1]
The performance of the methodology is compared to the detailed visual inspection (DVI) survey method used to asses the condition of the UK’s local road network [31]
The proposed system measures fretting in the longitudinal direction only and it might be expected that the results determined by the proposed system may not closely match that determined by the DVI methodology
Summary
The benefits of well-maintained road networks in terms of economic and social development have been recognised for many years [1]. Due to the combined effects of traffic and the environment roads deteriorate over time necessitating their maintenance [2]. Applying preventative road maintenance at an early stage of a road’s deterioration has been found to be 6-10 times less expensive than waiting until the road requires rehabilitation [3]. Road use costs (i.e. vehicle fuel, maintenance, travel time, accident and environment costs) reduce as road condition improves. To enable a road asset manager to make best use of resources, the condition of a road network needs to be assessed periodically so that the road maintenance can be applied timely and appropriately.
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