Surface monitoring of road pavements using mobile crowdsensing technology

Pavement-surface characteristics should be considered during road maintenance for safe and comfortable driving. A detailed and up-to-date report of road-pavement network conditions is required to optimize a maintenance plan. However, manual road inspection methods, such as periodic visual surveys, are timeconsuming and expensive. A common technology used to address this issue is SmartRoadSense, a collaborative system for the automatic detection of road-surface characteristics using Global Positioning System receivers and triaxial accelerometers contained in mobile devices. In this study, the results of the SmartRoadSense surveys conducted on Provincial Road 2 (SP2) in Salerno, Italy, were compared with the Distress Cadastre data for the same province and the pavement condition indices of different sections of the SP2. Although the effectiveness of the crowdsensing-based SmartRoadSense was found to vary with the distress type, the system was confirmed to be very efficient for monitoring the most critical road failures.

Automated summary

The study found that SmartRoadSense is very efficient for monitoring the most critical road failures, but its effectiveness varies with the distress type.