Current approaches to quantify the longitudinal road roughness

Abstract

Paper summarised the proposals of fourteen new alternative indexes intended for road roughness evaluation of longitudinal road profile, which have been introduced in the last decade approximately. The main advantages of proposed indexes are: (1) effort to reflect the most of ride quality aspects such as ride comfort, ride safety and dynamic load of road or cargo; (2) using the in situ measurements of vibration response or subjective perception of vibration; (3) effort to reflect the vehicle responses such as roll and pitch vibration, or longitudinal and lateral vibration; (4) effort to detect the critical parts of road in a spatial domain; and (5) effort to reflect a vehicle velocity. The main limitations of proposed indexes are: (1) many proposals are only alternative to the international roughness index (IRI) or are based on the IRI procedure; (2) a simple one-dimensional vehicle model is often used with the constant parameters and velocity; and (3) orientation to one vibration response category as ride comfort.

Keywords::

• road profile
• road roughness
• vibration
• international roughness index
• power spectral density
• quarter-car model

Acknowledgements

The help of the LTPP InfoPave Support Team with providing of SPS profiles data is highly appreciated. Author is indebted to Dr. Andreas Ueckermann for the Matlab programme code.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the VEGA Grant Agency of Slovak Academy of Sciences [grant number 2/0058/13].