A public transport system based sensor network for road surface condition monitoring

A well maintained road network is a must for the economic development and the well being of people in any country. Unfortunately, most developing countries do not poses such road networks. While the lack of funds is mainly to blame for not building new road networks and maintaining the existing ones the lack of proper monitoring and reporting system is a major contributory factor for the dilapidated condition of road networks in third world countries. A case in point is the road network in Sri Lanka; Sri Lanka has an extensive road network that spans the country and new roads are being built every day, yet even the roads in the capital city are not maintained properly. The lack of a monitoring and reporting mechanism is apparent in this case. We propose a public transport system based sensor network to monitor road surface condition. We are currently building such a network called BusNet to monitor environmental pollution and that system can be extended for road surface condition monitoring by adding acceleration sensor boards to the system.