Road surface profile monitoring based on vehicle response and artificial neural network simulation

Abstract

Road damage identification is still largely based on visual inspection methods and profilometer data. Visual inspection methods heavily rely on expert knowledge which is often very subjective. They also result in traffic flow interference due to the need for redirection of traffic to alternative routes during inspection. In addition to this, accurate high-speed profilometers, such as scanning vehicles, are extremely expensive often requiring strong economic justifications for their acquisition. The low-cost profilometers are very slow, typically operating at or less than walking speeds, causing their use to be labour-intensive if applied to large networks.This study aims at developing a road damage identification methodology for both paved and unpaved roads based on modelling the road-vehicle interaction system with an artificial neural network. The artificial neural network is created and trained with vehicle acceleration data as inputs and road profiles as targets. Then the trained neural network is consequently used for reconstruction of road profiles upon simulating it with vertical vehicle accelerations. The simulation process is very fast and can often be completed in a very short time thus making it possible to implement the methodology in real-time. Three case studies were used to demonstrate the feasibility of the methodology and the results on field tests carried out on mine vehicles with crudely measured road profiles showed a majority of the tested roads were reconstructed to within a fitting accuracy of less than 40% at a correlation level of greater than 55% which in this study was found to be practically acceptable considering the limitations imposed by the sizes of the haul trucks and their tyres as well as the quality of the road profiles and lack of control in the vehicle operation.