Book Description

A web-based PAVEment MONitoring system, PAVEMON, is a GIS oriented platform for accommodating, representing, and leveraging data from a multi-modal mobile sensor system. Stated sensor system consists of acoustic, optical, electromagnetic, and GPS sensors and is capable of producing as much as 1 Terabyte of data per day. Multi-channel raw sensor data (microphone, accelerometer, tire pressure sensor, video) and processed results (road profile, crack density, international roughness index, micro texture depth, etc.) are outputs of this sensor system. By correlating the sensor measurements and positioning data collected in tight time synchronization, PAVEMON attaches a spatial component to all the datasets. These spatially indexed outputs are placed into an Oracle database which integrates seamlessly with PAVEMON's web-based system. The web-based system of PAVEMON consists of two major modules: 1) a GIS module for visualizing and spatial analysis of pavement condition information layers, and 2) a decision-support module for managing maintenance and repair (M&R) activities and predicting future budget needs. PAVEMON weaves together sensor data with third-party climate and traffic information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) databases for an organized data driven approach to conduct pavement management activities. PAVEMON deals with heterogeneous and redundant observations by fusing them for jointly-derived higher-confidence results. A prominent example of the fusion algorithms developed within PAVEMON is a data fusion algorithm used for estimating the overall pavement conditions in terms of ASTM's Pavement Condition Index (PCI). PAVEMON predicts PCI by undertaking a statistical fusion approach and selecting a subset of all the sensor measurements. Other fusion algorithms include noise-removal algorithms to remove false negatives in the sensor data in addition to fusion algorithms developed for identifying features on the road. PAVEMON offers an ideal research and monitoring platform for rapid, intelligent and comprehensive evaluation of tomorrow's transportation infrastructure based on up-to-date data from heterogeneous sensor systems.