Determination of road profile using multiple passing vehicle measurements

This paper describes a novel method to determine a road profile through the analysis of accelerations in a passing vehicle. A direct integration algorithm is proposed to determine the profile from the measured vehicle acceleration response. A sprung mass model and a half-car model are used to represent the vehicles in separate analyses. Combining the direct integration algorithm with the Cross Entropy (CE) optimisation method, a vehicle fleet monitoring concept is proposed for the monitoring of roads and/or bridges. In this approach, the profile can be calculated using accelerations from multiple vehicles without prior knowledge of the vehicle properties. Numerical results show that calculated profiles are the same as the ‘true’ profiles which were used to generate the ‘simulated measured’ accelerations.