Evaluating International Roughness Index Data Quality at Project and Network Levels

Abstract

Pavement management can be considered to consist of network and project levels. Regardless of pavement management level, pavement condition data is an integral component and data quality can profoundly affect decision-making at all levels of pavement management. This paper therefore attempts to evaluate the quality of pavement roughness data (i.e. international roughness index or IRI) that is collected at project and network levels. IRI data quality collected at the project-level was found to be affected by the individual run, the wheel path, and the lane at which the profile is measured. IRI data quality collected during routine survey at the network level can be affected by the wheel path profile used to evaluate IRI. The variability of the IRI data was further quantified. Given the IRI collected from routine network-level surveys, a proposed relationship is developed to determine an IRI that is suitable for use in project-level pavement management applications.