Assessing the Effect of Pavement Distresses by Means of LiDAR Technology

The evaluation of the road surface roughness condition plays an important role for the assessment of the pavement condition. To measure the international roughness index (IRI), new emerging surveying techniques can be used in addition to the profilometer. Mobile laser scanner (MLS) data were acquired on a stretch of road and interpolated on a grid to build a 3D model representing the whole road surface. To evaluate the roughness, both dynamic and geometric IRIs were computed from (digital elevation model) DEM-derived elevation attributes. The computed values showed a similar trend and a high correlation with that derived from the profilometer; the differences between the corresponding values were generally less than 5%. To evaluate the effects of vibrations on human comfort, the built DEM was integrated into a dynamic simulation software user interface to compute the effects on the drivers of the vertical accelerations, considered another indicator of the pavement performance.