A Vibration-Based Methodology to Monitor Road Surface: A Process to Overcome the Speed Effect

Road pavement monitoring represents the starting point for the pavement maintenance process. To quickly fix a damaged road, relevant authorities need a high-efficiency methodology that allows them to obtain data describing the current conditions of a road network. In urban areas, large-scale monitoring campaigns may be more expensive and not fast enough to describe how pavement degradation has evolved over time. Furthermore, at low speeds, many technologies are inadequate for monitoring the streets. In such a context, employing black-box-equipped vehicles to perform a routine inspection could be an excellent starting point. However, the vibration-based methodologies used to detect road anomalies are strongly affected by the speed of the monitoring vehicles. This study uses a statistical method to analyze the effects of speed on road pavement conditions at different severity levels, through data recorded by taxi vehicles. Likewise, the study introduces a process to overcome the speed effect in the measurements. The process relies on a machine learning approach to define the decision boundaries to predict the severity level of the road surface condition based on two recorded parameters only: speed and pavement deterioration index. The methodology has succeeded in predicting the correct damage severity level in more than 80% of the dataset, through a user-friendly real-time method.