ABSTRACT
Continuous, real-time monitoring of the road network can assist in prioritising when roads should be maintained or rehabilitated. Timeous maintenance or rehabilitation of roads improves road safety and comfort and can be used to assist with investing the available funds and resources more intelligently. In this paper, it will be shown that telematics technology can potentially be used to monitor the condition of the extended road network and on a continuous, real-time basis. Telematics technology is continuously evolving and is currently used in the market to monitor and manage vehicle fleets, to retrieve hijacked/stolen vehicles and for driver behavioral insurance. Most telematics units incorporate Global Positioning Systems (GPS), acceleration and gyroscope sensors. Leading telematics companies generally have large databases and complex algorithms to store this type of information. In this paper, different statistical analysis techniques have been applied to the existing telematics data and the most promising outcome utilised to show that this technology contains additional potential in terms of monitoring the condition of the extended road network on a continuous, real-time basis. Although road roughness is currently measured using dedicated Class 1 profilometers, when effective calibration techniques are applied to the data harvested from telematics units, a reasonable accurate representation of the condition of the road can be produced. This was shown by sampling data from a few local passenger vehicles fitted with telematics devices and doing the necessary analysis and calibration techniques on the vertical (up/down) acceleration to produce data, which can provide a cost-effective indication of the condition of the extended road network in real-time.
