SmartPave (Smart systematic pavement management)

Pavement maintenance schedule for the given 8-year timespan
Pareto front
Flowchart of the optimization algorithm
Transfer Learning Algorithm

Inspiration

Every year hundreds of millions of dollars are allocated towards the maintenance of pavements in the commonwealth. Therefore, even the slightest improvement in budgeting management can make a significant difference.

What it does

Optimized road maintenance planning seeks solutions that minimize the life-cycle cost of a road network while maximizing the pavement quality. We propose a solution to find the best pavement schedules for different budgets. The formulation of the optimization model is carried out in such a way that a cost-effective maintenance strategy is reached by preserving the performance level of the road network at a desirable level.

How we built it

For demonstration purposes, the tailored multi-objective meta-heuristic algorithm is applied to 1000 road segments in the commonwealth. Data is obtained from SmarterRoads [1] collected yearly by VDOT. Four variously priced maintenance projects are defined based on the level of repair needed for the segment. Results are shown for an 8-year pavement maintenance schedule. The final timetable can be chosen based on what amount of budgeting is available and is optimized to maintain the highest pavement quality level within the given 8-year timespan. One instance is shown in TABLE 1. Pavement condition for each year is presented in TABLE 2 if this maintenance schedule is chosen. Moreover, the proposed model is robust in transferring learnings from various resources to replace the current data logging system.

Challenges we ran into

Image dataset for the classification of pavement quality is not currently available. Adding these data sources will increase the model's accuracy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Development of a robust multi-objective meta-heuristic algorithm that automatically schedules pavement maintenance. Moreover, a transfer learning model for pavement image classification is developed.

What we learned

The great potential of Machine learning algorithms in traffic applications to save tremendous amounts of money.

What's next for SmartPave (Smart systematic pavement management)

The model is robust and can be applied to a crowdsourced database for a more up to date and recurrent scheduling. Moreover, the proposed model is robust in transferring learnings from various resources to replace the current data logging system. The data collection section of the model will be strengthen using other data sources such as Mendeley data [2] for pavement conditions of different materials, or pictures and sensor data [3] collected from smartphones. This will greatly reduce and with enough participation eliminate the need for yearly assessments performed by VDOT.

References

[1] VDOT, "SmarterRoads dataset," [Online]. Available: http://smarterroads.org/dataset. [Accessed 27 04 2018]. [2] "Mendeley Datasets," [Online]. Available: https://data.mendeley.com/. [Accessed 27 04 2018]. [3] K. Gopalakrishnan, S. K. Khaitan, A. Choudhary and A. Agrawal, "Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with transfer learning for computer vision-based data-driven pavement distress detection," Construction and Building Materials, vol. 157, pp. 322-330, 2017.