A Low-Cost Real-time Road Surface Condition Monitoring and Alert System

A good transportation system is essential to modern society. Unfortunately, road networks deteriorate rapidly because of a range of reasons, namely wear and tear caused by the continuous and heavy flow of vehicles, weather elements such as heavy rain and high temperature and various excavation works that are carried out on the roads. Bad roads lead to accidents, damage to vehicles and increased fuel consumption. Therefore, the monitoring of road quality is crucial. This paper proposes a low-cost prototype that can be implemented in any vehicle. The device collects and transmits data on road quality to a cloud platform, where analytics is performed to assess and classify road condition. The pothole locations are viewable on a web page. While travelling, drivers receive real-time sound alerts on their mobile phones to warn them of imminent degradation in the road network, such as potholes. An Android application has been developed to synchronize with the database via the API and send real-time and up-to-date notifications to road users whenever they approach such areas. Authorities can also use the system to grasp the quality of the road network and automatically identify problems that may require immediate repair.