Characterizing 2D road profiles using ARIMA modeling techniques

Abstract

The principal excitation to a vehicle's chassis system is the road profile. Simulating a vehicle traversing long roads is impractical and a method to produce short roads with given characteristics must be developed. There are many methods currently available to characterize roads when they are assumed to be homogeneous. This work develops a method of characterizing non-stationary road profile data using ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) modeling techniques. The first step is to consider the road to be a realization of an underlying stochastic process. Previous work has demonstrated that an ARIMA model can be fit to non-stationary road profile data and the remaining residual process is uncorrelated. This work continues the examination of the residual process of such an ARIMA model. Statistical techniques are developed and used to examine the distribution of the residual process and the preliminary results are demonstrated. The use of the ARIMA model parameters and residual distributions in classifying road profiles is also discussed. By classifying various road profiles according to given model parameters, any synthetic road realized from a given class of model parameters will represent all roads in that set, resulting in a timely and efficient simulation of a vehicle traversing any given type of road.