Low Cost Road Health Monitoring System: A Case of Flexible Pavements

Shabir Hussain Khahro, Yasir Javed and Zubair Ahmed Memon
Additional contact information
Shabir Hussain Khahro: College of Engineering, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh 11586, Saudi Arabia
Yasir Javed: College of Computer Science and Information Sciences, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh 11586, Saudi Arabia
Zubair Ahmed Memon: College of Engineering, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh 11586, Saudi Arabia

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 18, 1-15

Abstract: A healthy road network plays a significant role in the socio-economic development of any country. Road management authorities struggle with pavement repair approaches and the finances to keep the existing road network to its best functionality. It has been observed that real-time road condition monitoring can drastically reduce road and vehicle maintenance expenses. There are various methods to analyze road health, but most are either expensive, costly, time-consuming, labor-intensive, or imprecise. This study aims to design a low-cost smart road health monitoring system to identify the road section for maintenance. An automized sensor-based system is developed to assist the road sections for repair and rehabilitation. The proposed system is mounted in a vehicle and the data have been collected for a more than 1000 km road network. The data have been processed using SPSS, and it shows that the proposed system is adequate for detecting the road quality. It is concluded that the proposed system can identify the vulnerable sections to add to the pavement maintenance plan. In the future, the created application can be launched as a smart citizen app where each car driver can install this application and can monitor the road quality automatically.

Keywords: road health; pavement condition; sensors; low-cost; sustainable transport; road pavement distresses; automated detection; low-cost technologies; pavement condition monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/18/10272/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/18/10272/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:18:p:10272-:d:635265

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().