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Academic Editor:Sangheon Pack
Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Cao'an Road 4800, Jiading District, Shanghai 201804, China
Received 20 December 2015; Revised 20 April 2016; Accepted 10 May 2016
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Pavement roughness significantly affects riding quality, driving safety, and fuel consumption. Highway authorities generally concentrate on reducing pavement roughness to improve driving quality and minimize related losses. However, without suitable evaluation of pavement roughness, road maintenance and rehabilitation are passive and aimless.
The international roughness index (IRI) was proposed by Sayers et al. [1] to measure road roughness. It is a well-recognized standard scale widely used in many countries. Several practical techniques have been proposed and implemented, which fall into three types: direct profile, indirect profile, and response type measurements [2], ranging from simple rod and level static measurements to more advanced high-speed noncontact surveys [3]. The relevant devices are difficult and/or expensive to operate and maintain, and the test cycles are relatively long and not sufficiently efficient to provide useful feedback to authorities. Therefore, we propose a new measurement method incorporating accelerometers combined with wireless communication and GPS to measure pavement roughness rapidly and efficiently.
The first attempts to measure pavement roughness, in the early years of the last century, were by a sliding straightedge [4]. Many mechanical devices were subsequently developed to improve measurement accuracy and efficiency. Direct profile measurements generally evaluate pavement roughness by directly measuring changes of elevation from the road surface, such as rod and level profile and longitudinal profiler (TRRL Beam). These measurements can provide precise IRI and can be used to calibrate other devices. However, they have obvious disadvantages for field tests and are inadequate for a wide range of measurements. Indirect profile measurements were designed to measure longitudinal profile over the wavelength range of interest [5]. They largely quantize displacement of vehicles caused by pavement roughness, such as the General Motors Research (GMR) profilometer and longitudinal profile analyzer (APL). These devices are more efficient than direct profile measurement but remain sensitive to the measurement environment. Response type measures...