Smart solution to road maintenance

A new study has found that motorists with smartphones could play an active role in maintaining roads.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have suggested that drivers could use high resolution three-axis accelerometers and GPS tracking already built into smartphones – together with a low-cost app – to record how a vehicle moves vertically in relation to the carriageway, which can provide a useful measure of road roughness for civil engineers.

Dr Michael Burrow, senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, said: “The most accurate automated methods of assessing road roughness use vehicles fitted with lasers, but even assessing the roughness of a reasonably sized network can be costly.

“An attractive solution is to use acceleration sensors built into most smartphones – because smartphone ownership and use are widespread, we can foresee an approach where the condition of road networks is assessed using crowdsourced data from these mobile devices.”

Maintaining roads at an appropriate standard encourages economic development and minimises road use costs such as travel time, fuel efficiency, vehicle repairs and accidents. However, collecting the data can prove too expensive for most agencies. For example, the cost of collecting road roughness data in the United States is $1.4m per year.

Dr Burrow added: “Vertical acceleration data from smartphones could be analysed using machine learning algorithms to enable IRI to be predicted to a similar accuracy as would be expected from a visual inspection, but with improved repeatability and reproducibility.

“A particularly useful application could be the assessment of the condition of low-volume rural road networks in developing countries where the majority of rural roads are constructed from either gravel or earth and where smartphone ownership is surprisingly high.”