Trafikverket mäter årligen skicket på det statliga belagda vägnätet med speciella mätfordon. Vägytemätningarna ger detaljerad information om vägytans och vägområdets tillstånd, samt indikationer på var det finns brister i vägkroppen. Informationen används vid planering av beläggnings- och avvattningsåtgärder, samt för uppföljning av vägarnas tillstånd. Förändringar i vägytans tillstånd som sker mellan mätningarna saknar Trafikverket systematisk information om, de fångas sporadiskt vid inspektioner och okulära inventeringar. Projektet uppkopplade vägytemätningar syftar till att utveckla, utvärdera och implementera en tjänst för mätning av beläggningstillstånd med hjälp av uppkopplade fordon. Genom att använda data från uppkopplade fordon kommer Trafikverket att kunna fånga snabba tillståndsförändringar på vägnätet och informationen kommer att utgöra ett viktigt analysunderlag för planering och genomförande av vägunderhåll. Målet är att nå ett effektivt och hållbart vägunderhåll genom att nyttja de möjligheter som samhällets digitala transformation erbjuder.

Tillämpning av uppkopplade vägytemätningar skapar förutsättningar för ett effektivt och hållbart vägunderhåll (rätt åtgärd på rätt plats vid rätt tidpunkt) som i sin tur kommer att leda till:

Ökad ekonomisk hållbarhet genom: Ett resurseffektivt vägunderhåll tack vare en optimerad verksamhet som baseras på bättre information och verktyg för planering, utförande och uppföljning av verksamheten. Minskade trafikantkostnader kopplade till skador som orsakas av dåligt vägtillstånd.

Ökad ekologisk hållbarhet genom: Minskade utsläpp kopplat till vägunderhåll, tack vare en effektivare planering och utförande av vägunderhåll. Minskade utsläpp från vägtrafiken tack vare minskade trafikstörningar och ökad tillgänglighet på transportinfrastrukturen som ett resultat för proaktiva och optimerade vägunderhåll. En effektivare trafikledning genom att samla in och leverera information om aktuella och akuta skador med hjälp av uppkopplade fordon i realtid. Således kommer trafikanterna att få information om dålig väglag i realtid även vid snabba tillståndförändringar.

Ökad social hållbarhet genom: Ökad jämställdhet genom att göra vägunderhållsbranschen mer attraktiv tack vare bättre och moderniserad arbetsstöd.

This report presents the outcomes of INFRACOMS WP5. WP5 aims to develop a methodology and toolkit for NRAs to guide them in the stages of work required to integrate new technologies into their asset management processes. This includes an organisational self-assessment tool to help NRAs understand their strengths and weaknesses around various aspects of best-practice in innovation. Using the results of their self-assessment, NRAs should be able to develop an organisational roadmap to help them improve in appropriate areas. A further aim of WP5 was to develop a framework for a technology roadmap, which would help NRAs identify the key technological components that would need to be included when developing a plan of action for introducing or implementing a specific technology for a particular use case. Note that the INFRACOMS proposal used the term “technology roadmap” for implementation planning, in this report the term implementation plan has been adopted.

This report represents INFRACOMS deliverable D2.1 Appraisal Methodology. It builds upon the deliverables of INFRACOMS Work Package 1 which identified the information needs, gaps and priorities of NRAs in terms of their approach to data collection and monitoring, and a list of current and emerging measurement technologies. This report includes a review of several commonly-used appraisal methodologies that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness, suitability and potential impact of new technologies for an organisation. These methodologies include Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA), Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA), Risk Assessment, and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). Elements of these commonly used methodologies are included in the INFRACOMS Appraisal Methodology. The report also includes key highlights from a workshop with NRAs conducted in January 2023 which also fed into the design of the appraisal methodology. The INFRACOMS Appraisal Methodology described here is designed around the technology use case, that is, a particular application of a technology by a NRA. It incorporates three core processes for Pre-Evaluation, Evaluation and Case Studies of technology use cases. It also includes processes for NRAs to define their strategic and technical priorities so that the appraisal process can be tailored to addressing their individual requirements, as identified from Work Package 1.

INFRACOMS aims to equip NRAs with the ability to better leverage the technological evolution in data and monitoring. INFRACOMS is investigating the capabilities and benefits of technologies for understanding the performance of highway assets. INFRACOMS is establishing a database of new technologies and a toolkit to appraise them, to help NRAs assess the costs, benefits and limitations of applying these technologies in their own environments. INFRACOMS will also provide a roadmap to provide strategy and guidance for NRAs to improve their business processes for more effective assessment and implementation of new technologies. This report represents the User Manual for the INFRACOMS Appraisal Toolkit as developed under Work Package 2.

This report is INFRACOMS first deliverable D1.1. It addresses the “Understanding of information needs and gaps” component of the project. The aim has been to identify the current priorities and future needs of NRAs for the management of carriageway and bridge assets, specifically in terms of their approach to data collection and monitoring. The approach has been to establish existing knowledge via a review of previous projects, current best practices and standards in data collection and inspection, and a review of current business processes, NRA strategies around data collection and digitalisation etc. The report identifies a set of key imperatives for carriageway and bridge assets covering Availability, Reliability, Environment, Economy and Safety. Each of these is supported by the collection of key condition data, which is used to report technical parameters and performance indicators that can be combined to assess the ability of the asset to meet its key imperatives. A wide range of technologies are identified, which are currently applied to collect the data that supports this assessment.

The consultation shows that there are also gaps between the desired and the current capability for the assessment of these assets. These include gaps in the data, challenges in the ability to collect the data, gaps in the application of the data that is already collected etc. A review of emerging technologies shows that there are tools and technologies that could help to fill these gaps. These could overcome the limitations of current technologies, better integrate new data sources, provide greater flexibility in using current and new data, and provide better analysis. They include remote sensing, Internet of Things (IoT), crowdsourcing, and advanced data processing/visualisation.

ISO/TC 43/SC 1/WG 39 is a working group under the Acoustics/Noise committee of ISO, working on standardization of the subject “Measurement of pavement surface texture using a profiling method”. The standardization focuses on road surface properties in the texture range, i.e. texture wavelengths under 500 mm. The main topic is to characterize road surface texture by using surface profiles and providing standardized measures for road condition investigations. Such conditions are essential in studies of, for example, noise, rolling resistance and skid resistance properties of pavement surfaces. The spectral analysis is especially used to distinguish different surface properties within the texture wavelength range, for instance high energy for a specific wavelength that could explain a uniformity at the surface.

One of the documents developed by WG 39 is ISO/TS 13473-4, Characterization of pavement texture by use of surface profiles — Part 4: Spectral analysis of surface profiles (Part 4 in the following text). This document has been under revision since 2020. The revised version aims to convert Part 4 to an international standard (ISO) from the current format, technical specification (TS). The future ISO describes two ways of doing spectral analysis, one mandatory Method 1 and one informative Method 2.

• Method 1: constant-percentage bandwidth obtained by digital filtering (main method);
• Method 2: constant narrow bandwidth frequency analysis by means of Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), followed by a transformation of the narrow-band spectrum to an octave- or one-third-octave-band spectrum.

During this revision of Part 4 there have been significant improvements to the whole document, in almost every step of the calculation. Special attention has been given to the uncertainty analysis and the influence on various input quantities to the texture spectrum. Uncertainty is an important and mandatory part of a standard that estimates the uncertainty magnitude or impact on the result. The studies done to complete the uncertainty chapter of Part 4 have been compiled into this document, and it could be seen as a model of how to work with uncertainties in a standard.

To appraise the ability to integrate the data provided by a specific technology into an existing data architecture this report commences with the development of an approach to describe the "ideal" data architecture, that can integrate various types of data from new and emerging technologies to facilitate decision making. The data architecture forms a pipeline from raw data creation/delivery to data ingestion, data organization, data analysis and visualisation, until information that is useful for decision making. We then review two existing data architectures as examples in the context of the proposed data architecture pipeline. From the understanding of the two sides – the data properties of technologies and the capabilities of data architectures – we develop an appraisal scoring process to evaluate the ability to integrate the new data into the existing data architecture.

To generalize this approach, the report presents a list of questions that can be used by stakeholders to help understand the data architecture used by any NRA (not only limited to the selected examples) when conduct the appraisal. We also develop an appraisal scoring process to evaluate the potential of the technologies to support practical decision making.The outcomes in this report (D3.2) and the previous one (D3.1), complete the INFRACOMS appraisal (scoring) system for the aspects of: data analysis, visualisation, integration into data architecture and potential support for decision making (forming part of the overall appraisal process). An example application of the process is presented for the case of acoustic emission monitoring the wire break in steel cables. In addition, the process has been applied to further technologies in the INFRACOMS database 1.0, and provided in the appendix. It is anticipated that refinement, and further guidance

ISO/TC 43/SC 1/WG 39 is a working group under the Acoustics/Noise committee working with standardization of the subject, “Measurement of pavement surface texture using a profiling method”. The standardization is focusing on road surface properties in the texture range, i.e., wavelengths under 500 mm. Currently, the main topic is to characterize road surface texture by use of surface profiles and providing standardized measures to be used for noise and road condition investigations. One of the standards developed by WG 39 is ISO 13473-1, Characterization of pavement texture by use of surface profiles — Part 1: Determination of mean profile depth (MPD) (International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 2019). The standard was revised 2019 and a correction was published in June 2021.

WG 39 has proposed an unofficial procedure to make a common interpretation of the standard to help researchers, system providers and developers of macrotexture calculations with a “reference” program code. Four members of WG 39 made calculations of MPD from eight digital reference raw texture profiles. During the work some ambiguities were detected in the standard that led to the corrected version in June 2021. The main reasons for the correction are related to how to process dropouts and some filtering details. It was decided how to address the ambiguities before the work was finalized. The calculations of the four members organizations of WG 39 provided their interpretation of the calculations and the results were compared. The comparison between calculated MPD values from the reference profiles shows very good results with only small differences that can be explained. To spread the work done by WG 39, the reference data, reference program code and the calculated MPD values are publicly available via https://www.erpug.org/ (European Road Profile Users’ Group). This work shows the importance of making a reference implementation of a standard when the standard is under development to ensure avoiding parts which can be interpreted in different ways.

Effective analysis and visualisation of data is critical for the efficient application of the data provided by carriageway and bridge condition monitoring technologies. It supports better decisions in relation to asset reliability, availability, safety, economy and environment. This report discusses the link between the data provided by monitoring technologies on the properties of assets and how the collected data can be analysed and visualised to provide value in decision support. The next step in the report is to use this understanding to develop an appraisal system which could enable technologies in the INFRACOMS technology database to be appraised (scored) in relation to their abilities for data analysis, visualisation, integration and use in decision support.

The presented system is referred to as the D3.1 scoring system. It consists of four components covering data visualisation, data analysis, integration within current data architectures and potential for practical decision-making. The present D3.1 report primarily examines the components pertaining to data visualisation and data analysis, while the exploration of the other two components, data architecture and decision support, will be carried out in the D3.2 report. It is proposed that the D3.1 scoring system could be used to appraise the capability of monitoring technologies to support asset management decisions, and would become an integral component of the INFRACOMS Appraisal Toolkit. It will also be used to further filter the current INFRACOMS Technology Database 2.0 technologies as part of the Appraisal Toolkit as INFRACOMS completes the development of the toolkit/database within WP2.

The purpose of the present study is to perform an objective evaluation of the roughness measurements from connected vehicles equipped with software from Nira Dynamics AB (Nira). The focus of the study is to determine the quality of the estimated IRI from the connected vehicles, regarding both daily and aggregated long-term data. The quality will be determined by comparing with a dedicated road surface measurement vehicle (VTIRST) from the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI) which is approved according to the Swedish Transport Administration's “Technical approval for road surface measurement”.

The study shows that the Nira estimated IRI is not quite the same as the IRI from the VTIRST. Nira’s estimated IRI may, however, be seen as a different index of road roughness, that may well be used in parallel with the standardized IRI. Also, the algorithms used by Nira can most likely be improved and produce a result closer to IRI from the VTIRST.

Syftet med föreliggande studie är att göra en objektiv utvärdering av jämnhetsmätningar från uppkopplade fordon utrustade med programvara från Nira Dynamics AB (Nira). Fokus är att bestämma kvaliteten på uppskattad IRI (International Roughness Index) från de uppkopplade fordonen, avseende både dagliga data och aggregerade långtidsdata. Kvaliteten bestäms genom att jämföra data från de uppkopplade fordonen med ett dedikerat fordon för vägytemätning (VTIRST) från Statens väg- och transportforskningsinstitut (VTI) som är godkänt enligt Trafikverkets ”Tekniskt godkännande för vägytemätning”.

Studien visar att Niras uppskattade IRI inte är riktigt detsamma som IRI från VTIRST. Niras uppskattade IRI kan dock ses som ett annat index för vägojämnheter, som mycket väl kan användas parallellt med den standardiserade IRI. Dessutom kan algoritmerna som används av Nira med största sannolikhet förbättras och ge ett resultat som ligger närmare IRI från VTIRST.