Towards a Frugal Framework for Monitoring Road Quality

Rapid urbanization of developing cities creates challenges for governments to update and maintain the city infrastructure. One particular challenge is to plan for road capacities that will sustain the growing demand for surface transportation on the road network. For these cities, a sophisticated road infrastructure that includes sensors (e.g., loop detectors and traffic cameras) and/or probe vehicles equipped to detect pavement roughness are ideal for traffic infrastructure management. However, the cost of such tools for developing cities is often prohibitively expensive. For these reasons, road infrastructure management strategies that are able to leverage low-cost technologies and data resources are highly sought after in these areas. The authors refer to these strategies as frugal innovations. In this paper the authors explore a frugal approach for monitoring road quality in Nairobi, Kenya. The authors aim is to use characteristics of speed distributions to detect the presence of pavement distresses (including speed bumps) for Nairobi, Kenya's road network. The authors first derive link speeds from mobile global positioning system (GPS) traces, and then perform graphical as well as quantitative distributional comparisons of the speed distributions on travel network links with speed bumps present, compared to links without speed bumps present. The authors results support the hypotheses that distributional comparisons on travel speeds can indeed serve as useful tools to detect the presence of speed bumps and other road distresses.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1109/ITSC.2014.6958175
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6948869
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstract reprinted with permission of IEEE.
• Corporate Authors:

  Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

  3 Park Avenue, 17th Floor
  New York, NY  United States  10016-5997
• Authors:
  • Bills, T
  • Bryant, R
  • Bryant, A W
• Conference:
  • 17th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC14)
  • Location: Qingdao , China
  • Date: 2014-10-8 to 2014-10-11
• Publication Date: 2014-10

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Pagination: pp 3022-3027
• Monograph Title: 17th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC14)

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Cameras; Global Positioning System; Loop detectors; Pavement distress; Pavement maintenance; Pavement management systems; Probe vehicles
• Geographic Terms: Nairobi (Kenya)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; I61: Equipment and Maintenance Methods;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01562057
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Apr 28 2015 3:09PM