A Data-Driven Rutting Depth Short-Time Prediction Model With Metaheuristic Optimization for Asphalt Pavements Based on RIOHTrack

Rutting of asphalt pavements is a crucial design criterion in various pavement design guides. A good road transportation base can provide security for the transportation of oil and gas in road transportation. This study attempts to develop a robust artificial intelligence model to estimate different asphalt pavements’ rutting depth clips, temperature, and load axes as primary characteristics. The experiment data were obtained from19 asphalt pavements with different crude oil sources on a 2.038km long full-scale field accelerated pavement test track(Road Track Institute, RIOHTrack) in Tongzhou, Beijing. In addition,this paper also proposes to build complex networks with different pavement rutting depths through complex network methods and the Louvain algorithm for community detection. The most critical structural elements can be selected from different asphalt pavement rutting data, and similar structural elements can be found. An extreme learning machine algorithm with residual correction(RELM) is designed and optimized using an independent adaptive particle swarm algorithm. The experimental results of the proposed method are compared with several classical machine learning algorithms, with predictions of average root mean squared error(MSE), average mean absolute error(MAE), and a verage mean absolute percentage error(MAPE) for 19 asphalt pavements reaching 1.742, 1.363, and 1.94% respectively. The experiments demonstrate that the RELM algorithm has an advantage over classical machine learning methods in dealing with non-linear problems in road engineering. Notably, the method ensures the adaptation of the simulated environment to different levels of abstraction through the cognitive analysis of the production environment parameters. It is a promising alternative method that facilitates the rapid assessment of pavement conditions and could be applied in the future to production processes in the oil and gas industry.

Influence of computation algorithm on the accuracy of rut depth measurement

Rutting is one of the dominant pavement distresses, hence, the accuracy of rut depth measurements can have a substantial impact on the maintenance and rehabilitation （M 8： R） strategies and funding allocation. Different computation algorithms such as straight- edge method and wire line method, which are based on the same raw data, may lead to rut depth estimation which are not always consistent. Therefore, there is an urgent need to assess the impact of algorithm types on the accuracy of rut depth computation. In this paper, a 1B-point-based laser sensor detection technology, commonly accepted in China for rut depth measurements, was used to obtain a database of 85,000 field transverse profiles having three representative rutting shapes with small, medium and high severity rut levels. Based on the reconstruction of real transverse profiles, the consequences from two different algorithms were compared. Results showed that there is a combined effect of rut depth and profile shape on the rut depth computation accuracy. As expected, the dif- ference between the results obtained with the two computation methods increases with deeper rutting sections： when the distress is above 15 mm （severe level）, the average dif- ference between the two computation methods is above 1.5 mm, normally, the wire line method provides larger results. The computation suggests that the rutting shapes have a minimal influence on the results. An in-depth analysis showed that the upheaval outside of the wheel path is a dominant shape factor which results in higher computation differences.