How to Estimate Pavement Roughness: Beyond International Roughness Index

Abstract

The standard way to describing the road\u27s 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