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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

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Title:

Relationship Between Winter Road Surface Conditions and Vehicular Motions Measured by GPS-Equipped Probe Vehicles

Abstract:

Taxis, which move around ceaselessly over a wide area, have great potential as a sensor for detecting what the road surface conditions are like across a given area. In order to establish a method to estimate road conditions based on the vehicular motion of taxis, some field experiments were conducted using probe vehicles that fitted with vehicular motion sensors and a GPS device. The slip ratio, defined as the relative difference in speed between vehicle and tire wheel, was effective in indicating how slippery roads surfaces were. Some features of vehicular motion specific to slippery roads were identified and the discriminability of road conditions, whether icy or dry, without using wheel speed data, was also examined.

Source(s):

82nd Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, Hokkaido University and Kitami Institute of Technology (Japan). For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2003

Author:

Nakatsuji, Kawamura

Keywords:


Mobile sensing
Pavement friction
Winter maintenance

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