Promoting the pavement skid resistance estimation by extracting tire-contacted texture based on 3D surface data

Abstract The pavement skid resistance is of vital importance for road safety and maintenance. The existing studies mainly calculates various parameters of pavement texture to evaluate the skid resistance. However, most researchers mainly calculate the whole texture parameters, but rarely consider which part of the texture is actually involved in the friction. This paper studies the measurement and calculation of the tire-pavement contact area and its influence on the skid resistance prediction. In this study, we proposed a set of methods to predict the rubber-contacted pavement area percentage and to extract the rubber-contacted texture. Besides, the skid resistance prediction models based on high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) surface data of the whole and the contacted texture are built and compared. The results show that when the rubber-contacted percentage is set at 20% or % (the predicted percentages), the accuracy of the prediction model is higher. It is demonstrated that the performance of the skid resistance prediction will be improved by extracting the contacted texture. Also, the amount of data can be considerably reduced, which will effectively relieves computational cost.