Evaluation of USAID Aceh road surface condition using dynamic time warping method: a preliminary study

The Aceh earthquake and tsunami that occurred on December 26, 2004 caused enormous losses, including in the sector of road infrastructure. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was one of the donor agencies that rebuilt a 250-kilometer road on the western coast of Aceh which is still in use today. To keep the road safe for use, routine inspections are required by the relevant parties. Routine road condition checks are costly and resource intensive. Therefore, we need more efficient technology in terms of cost, effort and time in the road inspection process. Technological developments have enabled the use of smartphones to support various activities, including recording road condition data using an accelerometer sensor. The Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) method can be used as a method for checking road conditions by utilizing the results of the accelerometer sensor measurement, especially movement on the z-axis. In addition, the location of the coordinates of the anomaly can also be determined by utilizing GPS sensor data which is analyzed by the K-means clustering method. In this preliminary study, we apply the DTW method and K-means clustering in examining the USAID road surface condition. The data employed in this study are the results of the accelerometer sensor on the USAID road surface along about 15.56 kilometers from the location of SMAN 1 Lhoknga to Lhokseudu Beach which is divided into several segments based on the topography of the road surface (flat, downhill, and uphill). The results of the study show that the road topography of downhill and uphill sections have worse conditions than the topography of the flat road. The road segment with the worst conditions in this study was the downhill 2 section. The preliminary study indicates that the application of the DTW method in measuring road surface quality potentially will save time and energy, reduce costs, and be able to provide more accurate measurement results than conventional inspection methods.