Accuracy enhancement of roadway anomaly localization using connected vehicles

Abstract The timely identification and localisation of roadway anomalies that pose hazards to the traveling public is currently a critical but very expensive task. Hence, transportation agencies are evaluating emerging alternatives that use connected vehicles to lower the cost dramatically and to increase simultaneously both the monitoring frequency and the network coverage. Connected vehicle methods use conventional GPS receivers to tag the inertial data stream with geospatial position estimates. In addition to the anticipated GPS trilateration errors, numerous other factors reduce the accuracy of anomaly localisation. However, practitioners currently lack information about their characteristics and significance. This study developed error models to characterise the factors in position biases so that practitioners can estimate and remove them. The field studies revealed the typical and relative contributions of each factor, and validated the models by demonstrating agreement of their statistics with the anticipated norms. The results revealed a surprising potential for tagging errors from embedded systems latencies to exceed the typical GPS errors and become dominant at highway speeds.