Analysis of urban pavement surface profiles oriented to environmental performance indicators

Urban pavement maintenance represents a challenging task due to the wide range of pavement types employed and due to congestion problems caused by road works. However because of high density of sensitive receptors, pavement surface related environmental issues such as traffic vibration and noise are also of outstanding importance. In this paper, pavement surface unevenness related the traffic vibration generation problem is examined. As far as road surface profiles are concerned, vibration generation can be split into two main components: a steady one due to uniformly distributed surface roughness and a transient one due to localized surface roughness. In this connection, according to the recent technical literature, road surface profiles can not be considered as stationary and ergodic and therefore have to be analyzed in order to extract transient (localized) features and, subsequently, to detect homogeneous stationary sections. Different algorithms proposed in literature to accomplish this task have been selected and examined and a procedure to benchmark their effectiveness has been proposed. Results provided by these algorithms have been implemented into the development of an environmental oriented pavement performance indicators. The pavement performance indicator proposed is related to traffic vibration issue and can be easily employed in a general framework of indicators for urban pavement maintenance purpose. Finally, an application of the analysis procedure to a case study dealing with a urban porphyry block pavement is presented and discussed.