Abstract: Airport runway roughness has an important influence on the stable operation of aireraft on runways. The interna-tional roughness index (IRD) is a commonly used indicator for evaluating airport runway roughness, but IRI was o-riginally proposed as an indicator for highway roughness evaluation, and current research on the applicabilityanalysis of using IRI to evaluate airport runway roughness is insufficient. This paper establishes a virtual proto-type model and verifies its reliability. Aircraft taxiing simulation analyses are conducted separately on heteroge-neous runways with the same IRI, on runways characterized as smooth by IRI, and on runways with measured el-evation information, to obtain aircraft vibration response data and investigate the correlation between IRI and air-craft vibration response. The results show that on heterogeneous runways with the same IRI, aircraft vibration re-sponses exhibit completely different results, and on runways characterized as smooth by IRI, the correlation be-tween aircraft vibration response and IRI is very strong. The correlation between IRI obtained from different take-off lengths and the root mean square of vertical accelerations at the aireraft center of gravity and cockpit is poor,and the correlation between measured IRI and the root mean square of vertical acceleration in the aircraft cockpitis also poor. Therefore, using IRI to evaluate airport runway roughness is difficult to reflect the true vibration re-sponse of aircraft, it is recommended to establish a runway roughness evaluation indicator capable of identifyingthe time and location when unsafe vibrations occur during aircraft taxing, based on a comprehensive considera-tion of aircraft type, its vibration response and taxiing speed.

Key words: airport runway, international roughness index (IRl), virtual prototype model, vibration response, applicability