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.

Road-Feature-Based Multiparameter Road Complexity Calculation Model of Off-Road Environment

“…PSD, a mathematical representation of the spatial wavelength composition of road profiles rather than a summary index of roughness [17], is calculated by the equation provided by ISO 8608 standard [18]; according to PSD, road roughness is divided into eight different classes. Dynamic load index (DLI), representing truck dynamic loads transmitted to road pavements due to the presence of irregularities on pavements surface [19], is calculated as a weighted index of variances of the profile elevations in the frequency ranges of 1.5-4 and 8-15 Hz, where the first frequency range corresponds to truck body bounce, the second frequency range to axle bounce [20]. However, whether it is IRI, PSD, or DLI, it can only reflect the road complexity to a certain extent.…”

Application of Vehicle Mounted Accelerometers to Measure Pavement Roughness

“…Response type measures pavement roughness by correlating the vehicles response (displacement, acceleration, etc.) caused by roughness to the IRI calculated from a profile, such as Bump Integrator [6][7][8]. These devices can effectively improve the measurement efficiency, but the time stability is relatively poor and easily gets affected by environment [9].…”

Ride Quality Due to Road Surface Irregularities: Comparison of Different Methods Applied on a Set of Real Road Profiles

“…In particular, in [13], the inability of IRI to describe car body vertical vibration due to the presence of certain wavelengths (i.e., >20 m) of road profile was described. In recent decades, several indices have been developed as alternative methods to consider various effects [14]. Particular attention has been paid to the assessment of the influence of road unevenness on vehicles and passenger vibrations [15,16], and the evaluation of possible correlations between existing roughness indicators and vehicles vibration response [17].…”