Spatiotemporal Analysis of Pavement Roughness Using Connected Vehicle Data for Asset Management

Pavement condition monitoring and its timely maintenance is necessary to ensure the safety and quality of the roadway infrastructure. The International Roughness Index (IRI) is a commonly used measure to quantify road surface roughness and is a critical input to asset management. In Indiana, the IRI statistic contributes to roughly half of the pavement quality index computation used for asset management. Most agencies inventory IRI once a year, however, pavement conditions vary much more frequently. The objective of this paper is to develop a framework using crowdsourced connected vehicle data to identify and detect temporal changes in IRI. Over 3 billion connected vehicle records in Indiana were analyzed across 30 months between 2022 and 2024 to understand the spatiotemporal variations in roughness. Annual comparisons across all major interstates in Indiana showed the miles of interstates classified as “Good” decreased from 1896 to 1661 miles between 2022 and 2024. The miles of interstate classified as “Needs Maintenance” increased from 82 to 120 miles. A detailed case study showing monthly and daily changes of estimated IRI on I-65 are presented along with supporting dashcam images. Although the crowdsourced IRI estimates are not as robust as traditional specialized pavement profilers, they can be obtained on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. The paper concludes by suggesting a combination of frequent crowdsourced IRI and commercially available dashcam imagery of roadway can provide an agile and responsive mechanism for agencies to implement pavement asset management programs that can complement existing annual programs.