Intelligent decision-making model in preventive maintenance of asphalt pavement based on PSO-GRU neural network

The milage of asphalt pavement growth explosively around the world in the past decades resulted in a tremendous maintenance workload. Preventive maintenance (PM) is an effective strategy in saving budget, keeping the pavement in good condition, and extending pavement life. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm enhanced gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural network is developed in this research to predict five pavement performance parameters. The model is trained based on a dataset containing seven-year distress measurement data in 100-m intervals, traffic load data, climatic records, and maintenance records of a chosen highway in China. The random forest (RF) algorithm is used to analyze the influence of the factors on pavement performances for different lanes. The result shows the PSO-GRU model could increase the prediction accuracy by 21% on average compared with traditional ANN and 17% on average compared with the AdaBoost model. The validation case study shows a significant consistency between the predicted pavement quality index and the whole-year measurement data with a 0.67 coefficient of determination. This study demonstrates the potential of using the PSO-GRU neural network to provide the most effective treatment at a given location on a highway.

Automated summary

A PSO-GRU neural network model is developed to predict pavement performance parameters, and it shows better prediction accuracy compared to traditional methods and the AdaBoost model. This model has the potential to provide the most effective treatment on highways.