The USDOT's planned Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) program is still in its infancy and presents an opportunity for the automotive industry and state/local departments of transportation to develop strategic partnerships to leverage each other's data and infrastructure. This paper presents a method to monitor pavement condition by proposing procedures to leverage vehicle accelerometer and position data using the emerging VII infrastructure. In the study, test vehicles were mounted with accelerometers and GPS units. Body mounted accelerometers are very effective at detecting potholes and other pavement distress. However, the spatial uncertainty of GPS data precludes the simple averaging of data. This paper illustrates the importance of post-processing accelerometer data with correlation algorithms to effectively identify pavement distress. Using the data, the paper proposes a method of implementing a real time, distributed network of equipped vehicles to provide a cost-effective, frequently updated survey of ride quality over a wide geographic area, which could provide data to aid in routine maintenance, network-level repaving, and risk management decisions.
Abstract