Development of a crowdsourcing-based system for computing the international roughness index

ABSTRACT

Pavement roughness is one of the essential parameters of pavement quality affecting ride quality, driving safety, and fuel consumption. The International Roughness Index has been widely deployed to evaluate pavement surface roughness. A vibration-based system is developed by using a low-cost three-axis Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems accelerometer and a Global Positioning System sensor, which are connected to an Arduino board and embedded in a vehicle to monitor the road condition. The pavement profile is obtained by double integration of Z-axis acceleration data, and then the International Roughness Index is calculated via the Process Valves & Automation Systems Software using the obtained profile. The calculated International Roughness Index is correlated with ground truth data captured by a Road Surface Profiler with the coefficient of determination of 0.82 and an average error of 15%. The results demonstrate that the developed system can calculate the International Roughness Index with adequate accuracy at the network level. Besides, due to the low system cost and ease of use, it can be widely applied by road users to monitor pavement roughness as a crowdsourcing-based data collection system.

KEYWORDS:

• International roughness index (IRI)
• crowdsourcing
• road surface monitoring
• pavement management systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.