How to Estimate Pavement Roughness: Beyond International Roughness Index

Authors

Edgar Daniel Rodriguez Velasquez, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Carlos M. Chang Albitres, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

3-2019

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-19-23

To appear in Journal of Uncertain Systems, 2019, Vol. 13.

Abstract

The standard way to describing the road's roughness it to use a single numerical characteristics called International Roughness Index (IRI). This characteristic describes the effect of the road roughness on a vehicle of standard size. To estimate IRI, practitioners tried to use easily available vehicles (whose size may be somewhat different) and then estimate IRI based on these different-size measurements. The problem is that the resulting estimates of IRI are very inaccurate -- which means that a single numerical characteristic like IRI is not sufficient to properly describe road roughness. In this paper, we show that the road roughness can be described by a fractal (power law) model. As a result, we propose to supplement IRI with another numerical characteristic: the power-law exponent that describes how the effect of roughness changes when we change the size of the vehicle.