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Precise International Roughness Index Calculation

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Abstract

Roadway infrastructure management focuses on quality of the road surfaces which influences the pavement longevity and riding quality. The road surface quality can be expressed in many ways from which the International Roughness Index has been recognized widely around the developed countries. This paper summarizes the derivation of International Roughness calculation and proposes a new numerical method for its computation. Compared to original Sayers’s method, it does not use iterative approximation, which makes it much faster for non-uniformly sampled road data. This is useful, for example, for profiles generated from LIDAR point clouds. The method can be used for arbitrary polynomial model of segments between elevation samples. Except the Fortran code listed in the original paper, the code for the original algorithm has not been publicly available and most researchers relied on the ProVAL software with several limitations, including uniform sampling, the lack of automation, and little control over the influence of resampling methods and the initialization of the quarter-car simulation procedure. We provide Matlab codes for both the original method and the algorithm newly proposed in this paper.

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Data Availability

All data and code of the proposed method are available in an online repository https://github.com/michalsorel/iri.

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Acknowledgements

The work reported here has been conducted as part of the research project "Implementation of Industry 4.0 principles during production and repairs of constructional layers of surface transportation" supported by Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Theory and Automation, The Czech Academy of Sciences, Pod Vodarenskou vezi 8, Prague, Czech Republic

    Filip Šroubek & Michal Šorel

  2. Department of Construction Management and Economics, Faculty of Civil Engineering, CTU in Prague, Thakurova 7, Prague, Czech Republic

    Josef Žák

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  1. Filip Šroubek
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  2. Michal Šorel
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Correspondence to Josef Žák.

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Šroubek, F., Šorel, M. & Žák, J. Precise International Roughness Index Calculation. Int. J. Pavement Res. Technol. 15, 1413–1419 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42947-021-00097-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42947-021-00097-z

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