Abstract
Road infrastructure is important to the well-being and economic health of all nations. The performance of road pavement infrastructure is sophisticated and affected by numerous factors and varies greatly across different roads. Large scale spatial analysis for assessing road infrastructure performance is increasingly required for road management, therefore multi-source factors, including satellite remotely sensed climate and environmental data, and ground-monitored vehicles observations, are collected as explanatory variables. Different from the traditional point or area based geospatial attributes, the performance of pavement infrastructure is the line segment based spatial data. Thus, a segment-based spatial stratified heterogeneity method is utilized to explore the comprehensive impacts of vehicles, climate, properties of road and socioeconomic conditions on pavement infrastructure performance. Segment-based optimal discretization is applied on discretizing segment-based pavement data, and a segment-based geographical detector is utilized to assess the spatial impacts of variables and their interactions. Results show that the segment-based methods can more reasonably and accurately describe the characteristics of line segment based spatial data and assess the spatial associations. The two major categories of factors associated with pavement damage are the variables of traffic vehicles and heavy vehicles in particular, and climate and environmental conditions. Meanwhile, the interactions between the explanatory variables in these two categories have much more influence than the single explanatory variables, and the interactions can explain more than half of the pavement damage. This study highlights the great potential of remote sensing based large scale spatial analysis of road infrastructures. The approach in this study provides new ideas for spatial analysis for segmented geographical data. The findings indicate that the quantified comprehensive impacts of variables are practical for wise decision-making for road design, construction and maintenance.
Highlights
The condition of road infrastructure is affected by numerous factors and varies greatly on different roads
The results indicate that the pavement infrastructure performance is significantly related to the interactive impacts between vehicles and heavy vehicles, and the climate and environmental conditions, and the impacts are nonlinearly enhanced by both categories of variables
This study indicates that the impacts of climate and environment are significant and the impacts vary on different road segments on the road network
Summary
The condition of road infrastructure is affected by numerous factors and varies greatly on different roads. Numerous factors, including traffic conditions, climate and environment, and the characteristics of the pavement itself, have sophisticated and significant influence on pavement condition, including pavement lifespan, surface texture, structure, materials, and transportation load capacity [6,7]. Ignoring these factors in road construction and pavement materials selection may lead to a cumulative burden, premature damage, reduction of longevity and increased costs for road maintenance [2,8]. The monitoring indicators can generally reflect one or several aspects of the pavement infrastructure performance
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
