A ROAD PAVEMENT MONITORING PROCESS FOR URBAN ROAD: THE CASE STIDY OF VIA LEONARDO DA VINCI IN FLORENCE

The Road Pavement Condition (RPC) is an important index of both the economic level and the development of a country. Road Authorities (RAs) and Road Users (RUs) need a high efficiency, safe and comfortable road network; therefore, maintaining an appropriate road service level and evaluating an effective road pavement maintenance program requires great organizational and economic capacity by RAs. In this context, small RAs and Municipality too often do not have the budget to adequately monitor and to maintain (in time) the high extension of their road networks. To date, the most efficient monitoring methodologies are expensive, and the RAs cannot monitor their roads, then, cannot to intervene with appropriate and preventive maintenance instead with emergency interventions on road pavements (with an increase in costs). In this framework, this paper presents an innovative and proactive concept of road pavement monitoring process, based on a high-performance and inexpensive methodology, which offers competent RAs and technicians’ data that describe road pavement conditions before they represent a safety problem. This paper focused on the description of the monitoring and post-processing procedures that aim to perform a screening network based on the most deteriorated sections, by using vertical acceleration recorded by a common black box installed on vehicles that routinely pass along with the road network. To demonstrate the goodness and reliability of the proposed methodology, a case study conducted in the local streets of the Municipality of Florence was described. The focus of the case study is to the ability of the vibration-based data (vertical accelerations) to identify the road sections which need maintenance with different priorities, according to the traditional monitoring process (PCI surveys). At the same time, the pros, and cons of the process to improve the research and complete the development of the process (e.g., limits to be solved) to disseminate the simple procedure to the RAs that need it were discussed.