How Rough Is Your Runway?

Using Trimble TX9 terrestrial laser scanner my surveying team scanned an active runway in Western Australia to a tolerance spec of 3mm. The teams were working a live site providing aircraft right of way meant the teams had to setup and takedown scanner and targets to yield to any aircraft movements around the site and airspace. Surveyors took a ground based approach over drone UAS to maintain tighter vertical control than can be achieved using drone capture. We were tasked with looking for deviations, rutting and areas to derive Pavement Condition Index (PCI) criteria for their asset.

Once the data was captured surveying teams utilized TopoDot to assemble the raw scans into a consolidated model. They then attempted to use the pavement roughness algorithms in the software against the close to 3.4b points of classified data but had to split the datasets into halves and quads in order for the processing runs to complete. The Bentley product has an inbuilt “Road condition tool” which reports on pavement roughness characteristics but has preset expected pavement widths, roads not runway widths, set in the software. We explained to our surveyors that the algorithms might run faster in another product. It allowed us to explore FME as a point cloud processing workflow using feature tables functionality to quickly generate the statistics required for reporting deliverables using the entire dataset in one process.