A practical routing model for optimized pavement data collection

Abstract

Federal laws require regular condition reporting for portions of the national highway system. Most agencies use instrumented vehicles to collect data on and report the required information. The routing of these vehicles, however, is often managed in an ad hoc manner with significant expense. This paper introduces a practical optimization method for designing the routes of pavement data collection equipment. The proposed model requires, as input, only the global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the segments' start and end points along with a set of viable hotels. The authors tested the model on two real-world instances provided by a pavement testing consultant. The optimized routes show a cost savings of up to 30% relative to the routes generated using current best-practices in the field.