APTech celebrates publication of The Little Book of Profiling, Second Edition
Cover of The Little Book of Profiling, Second Edition
First invented in the 1960s, the inertial profiler set in motion a paradigm shift in road roughness measurement. No longer encumbered by the constraints of static profiling methods or the inconsistencies of response-type roughness measurement systems, state highway agencies quickly adopted this new technology to aid in their pavement management efforts, and with this widespread adoption came the need for educational resources. Enter The Little Book of Profiling, First Edition. Authored by Michael Sayers, Ph.D., with assistance from Steve Karamihas, Ph.D., in 1995, the ambitious publication set out to answer three basic questions:
How do profilers work?
What can be done with their measurements?
What can be done to reduce measurement errors?
The work served as the definitive industry resource for over 30 years. This year, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute published an update to the book, this time authored by Karamihas—now a Senior Engineer with APTech—using Sayers’s foundational work. The Second Edition covers what has changed after three decades, including the increasingly common practice of using road profilers for construction quality assurance and for measuring urban and low-speed roadways. It also describes the improvements made in profile measurement technology, the collective greater understanding of measurement efforts, and new measurement and analysis standards.
“The Little Book is older now than I was when it was originally written,” said Steve. “I was honored that Dr. Sayers allowed me to assist him with the original version and thrilled at the opportunity to work on the Second Edition.”
The Little Book of Profiling, Second Edition is available as a free download from the University of Michigan Library. Please reach out to APTech’s Steve Karamihas if your agency has questions about the world of longitudinal road profiling.