Proposal for a Low-Cost Monitoring System to Assess the Pavement Deterioration in Urban Roads

Abstract

Effective scheduling of pavement monitoring and maintenance activities plays a pivotal role in ensuring safety and comfort for road users. The Pavement Management System (PMS) is a traditional tool to assist the road manager in the decision-making process on which priority maintenance activities to carry out. However, for urban road networks the implementation of a PMS can be complicated due to the many functional and operational problems. This paper presents a prototype low-cost inertial sensor-based system for monitoring the pavement conditions in urban road networks. Starting by the measurements of the vertical accelerations collected in a vehicle riding on a rough pavement, the frequency-weighted vertical acceleration a_wz was calculated according to ISO 2631 standard. This parameter can be adopted as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) by relating the road roughness to the human whole-body vibration (WBV) exposure on the road user. Some field tests were carried out identifying urban roads in an Italian city with different levels of pavement deterioration. Measurements to evaluate the pavement deterioration were performed using traditional visual inspections and the proposed sensor embedded in a test vehicle (run at different speeds) in order to identify a relationship between these indices in terms of performance classes.