New Approach for Estimating International Roughness Index Based on the Inverse Pseudo Excitation Method

Abstract

The international roughness index (IRI) is widely used in pavement engineering, the automobile industry, and the transportation field. Therefore, estimating the IRI of road roughness is necessary. The inverse pseudo excitation method (IPEM) was summarized for single-source stationary random excitation and multisource stationary random excitations. A new approach for IRI estimation was proposed based on the IPEM and dynamic responses of the planar vehicle model with 4 degrees of freedom (DOFs), including the tire enveloping property. An experiment was conducted to validate the proposed approach. The results indicated that the proposed approach is capable of estimating the IRI of road roughness. Analyses of the impacts of traveling speed, road roughness grade, vehicle type, ratio of signal to noise (S/N), and tire enveloping characteristics on the new approach were conducted. The simulation results showed that the approach is independent of the traveling speed, road roughness grade, and vehicle type and robust to S/N and tire enveloping characteristics. The new approach for IRI estimation based on IPEM and vehicle responses is potentially helpful and worthy of research and application.