PIARC WORLD ROAD ASSOCIATION - INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENT TO HARMONISE LONGITUDINAL AND TRANSVERSE PROFILE MEASUREMENT AND REPORTING PROCEDURES - DRAFT REPORT

In 1998, the PIARC committee C1 on Surface Characteristics carried out a worldwide experiment to investigate the performance of different high speed profiling equipment. During the last decade, the operational effectiveness of profiling road and airfield pavements has increased greatly due to the introduction of non-contact sensors, such as lasers and other optical equipment. The sensors are capable of measuring the distance from a given reference point to the pavement surface at high speed. Modern data acquisition systems and computers make it possible to process and store the large amount of data produced by these devices. This technology can measure both longitudinal and transverse pavement profiles at ordinary traffic speed. Thus, it is possible to avoid road closures or traffic hold-ups, which were caused in earlier years by slow moving measuring vehicles. Although the basic concept of modern pavement profiling equipment is fundamentally the same, the development of the various measuring devices has shown great creativity around the world. The design of the different pieces of equipment clearly reflects the policy of what is considered sufficient information (in the different countries) when measuring longitudinal and transverse profiles. The investigation of how the differences in opinion and technology reflect the result of the measurements of these devices is the fundamental reason for carrying out this PIARC experiment.