Analysis of vehicle use patterns during military field exercises to identify potential roads

Concentrated off-road vehicle traffic during military training exercises may result in newly formed roads, termed potential roads. Potential roads need to be identified to be rehabilitated, have traffic dispersed to return the land to its natural status, or to be included in the established road construction and maintenance programs. GPS vehicle tracking data collected during an eight-day reconnaissance training exercise in the Yakima Training Center (YTC) in October 2001 were analyzed for vehicle movement patterns. Comparison of the on-road and off-road movement patterns indicates that potential roads may exist on the locations where the concentrated traffic occurred. Factors were extracted to characterize the special movement patterns that indicate the vehicles moved on a potential road.; The YTC was divided into small study units, and a multicriteria method was developed to determine if a study unit is a portion of a potential road. The multicriteria method was evaluated by comparing the predictions to the site visit results on 34 selected road segments that met different criteria levels. Results show that locations meeting higher criteria levels have higher possibilities to be roads: the location meeting all five criteria has an approximately 91% possibility for road existence; those meeting four criteria have an approximately 55% possibility; and for those meeting criteria level two or three, there is an approximately 14% probability for road existence.; A neural network approach for identifying the potential roads was introduced and compared to the multicriteria method. Simplified methods were also discussed by investigating each of the variables: the GPS point density, vehicle velocity, and the number of passes within a study unit as a single input for detecting potential road areas. Considering the discrete situation in the predicted potential road areas, a kernel smoothing technique was introduced and applied to smooth the results to improve the continuity of the potential roads. The application found the kernel smoothing technique was able to obtain continuous potential road grids by selecting reasonable bandwidth.