Most European Countries, in recognition of the vital importance a country’s transport sector carries in terms of economic impacts, but most importantly in terms of its citizens’ quality of life, have set as a national priority the improvement of transport networks and the promotion of sustainable transport. Further, in alignment with the principles defined by the “Europe 2020” strategic framework[1], most national Smart Specialization Strategy (SSS) documents have included transport, as one of their primary sectors. In doing so, these strategies highlight how transport has great prospects for research and innovation (R&I) development in the EU Member States since it is directly associated with economic development, social services, accessibility, environmental pollution and eventually the quality of everyday life of people.
Pavement condition assessment is a vital aspect of maintaining and managing road infrastructure and thus to achieving national and EU-wide transport-related goals. In the EU, several policies and initiatives have been implemented to address this issue. The European Union Road Federation (ERF) has developed a standardised methodology for the assessment of pavement condition, known as the ERF Pavement Assessment Procedure (ERF-PAP), which is widely used by EU member states for the regular assessment of pavement condition on their road networks. Further, the EU’s “Transport Research and Innovation Monitoring and Information System” (TRIMIS) regularly publishes reports on the latest developments in the field of pavement assessment and management, including research projects and case studies from EU member states, and the EU’s “Horizon 2020” research and innovation program has funded several projects related to pavement assessment, such as “Smart Pavement System” and “Innovative Pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation Techniques”. Overall, the aforementioned EU policies and initiatives demonstrate a strong commitment to improving the quality of EU roadway pavements.
The proposed system is of practical importance since it provides continuous information about roadway pavement surface anomalies which are valuable for efficiently monitoring the transport infrastructure and for public safety. The vision for roadway condition assessment by utilisation of smartphone-like technology is set in parallel with the hypothesis that such technology can be used for crowd-sourced data collection and analysis in GIS-based pavement management systems (PMS), and that the developed technology and related transport informatics are disruptive technologies that have the potential to reshape the transport and infrastructure O&M industries through the project objectives listed in Table 1.