Pavement deterioration modeling is important in providing information regarding the future state of the road network and in determining the needs of preventive maintenance or rehabilitation treatments. This research incorporated spatial dependence of road network into pavement deterioration modeling through a graph neural network (GNN). The key motivation of using a GNN for pavement performance modeling is the ability to easily and directly exploit the rich structural information in the network. This paper explored if considering spatial structure of the road network will improve the prediction performance of the deterioration models. The data used in this research comprises a large pavement condition data set with more than a half million observations taken from the Pavement Management Information System (PMIS) maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation. The promising comparison results indicates that pavement deterioration prediction models perform better when spatial relationship is considered.

Flooding can damage pavement infrastructure significantly, causing both immediate and long-term structural and functional issues. This research investigates how flooding events affect pavement deterioration, specifically focusing on measuring pavement roughness by the International Roughness Index (IRI). To quantify these effects, we utilized 20 years of pavement condition data from TxDOT's PMIS database, which is integrated with flood event data, including duration and spatial extent. Statistical analyses were performed to compare IRI values before and after flooding and to calculate the deterioration rates influenced by flood exposure. Moreover, we applied Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques, such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), to assess the impact of flooding on pavement performance. The results demonstrate that flood-affected pavements experience a more rapid increase in roughness compared to non-flooded sections. These findings emphasize the need for proactive flood mitigation strategies, including improved drainage systems, flood-resistant materials, and preventative maintenance, to enhance pavement resilience in vulnerable regions.

Mean texture depth (MTD) is pivotal in assessing the skid resistance of asphalt pavements and ensuring road safety. This study focuses on developing an automated system for extracting texture features and evaluating MTD based on pavement images. The contributions of this work are threefold: firstly, it proposes an economical method to acquire three-dimensional (3D) pavement texture data; secondly, it enhances 3D image processing techniques and formulates features that represent various aspects of texture; thirdly, it establishes multivariate prediction models that link these features with MTD values. Validation results demonstrate that the Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT) model achieves remarkable prediction stability and accuracy (R2 = 0.9858), and field tests indicate the superiority of the proposed method over other techniques, with relative errors below 10%. This method offers a comprehensive end-to-end solution for pavement quality evaluation, from images input to MTD predictions output.

Due to the varying intensity of pavement cracks, the complexity of topological structure, and the noise of texture background, image classification for asphalt pavement cracking has proven to be a challenging problem. Fatigue cracking, also known as alligator cracking, is one of the common distresses of asphalt pavement. It is thus important to detect and monitor the condition of alligator cracking on roadway pavements. Most research in this area has typically focused on pixel-level detection of cracking using limited datasets. A novel deep convolutional neural network that can achieve two objectives is proposed. The first objective of the proposed neural network is to classify presence of fatigue cracking based on pavement surface images. The second objective is to classify the fatigue cracking severity level based on the Distress Identification Manual (DIM) standard. In this paper, a databank of 4484 high-resolution pavement surface images is established in which images are taken locally in the Town of Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. In the data pre-preparation, over 4000 images are labeled into 4 categories manually according to DIM standards. A four-layer convolutional neural network model is then built to achieve the goal of classification of images by pavement crack severity category. The trained model reached the highest accuracy among all existing methods. After only 30 epochs of training, the model achieved a crack existence classification accuracy of 96.23% and a severity level classification accuracy of 96.74%. After 20 epochs of training, the model achieved a pavement marking presence classification accuracy of 97.64%.

Object detection is a critical component of transportation systems, particularly for applications such as autonomous driving, traffic monitoring, and infrastructure maintenance. Traditional object detection methods often struggle with limited data and variability in object appearance. The Oriented Window Learning Vision Transformer (OWL-ViT) offers a novel approach by adapting window orientations to the geometry and existence of objects, making it highly suitable for detecting diverse roadway assets. This study leverages OWL-ViT within a one-shot learning framework to recognize transportation infrastructure components, such as traffic signs, poles, pavement, and cracks. This study presents a novel method for roadway asset detection using OWL-ViT. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of the model in terms of detection consistency, semantic flexibility, visual context adaptability, resolution robustness, and impact of non-max suppression. The results demonstrate the high efficiency and reliability of the OWL-ViT across various scenarios, underscoring its potential to enhance the safety and efficiency of intelligent transportation systems.

Efficient and current roadway geometry data collection is a critical task for transportation agencies to undertake effective road planning, maintenance, design, and rehabilitation efforts. The methods for gathering such data can be broadly classified into two categories: a) land-based methods, which encompass field inventory, mobile mapping, and image logging, and b) aerial-based methods, which involve satellite imagery, drones, and laser scanning. However, employing land-based techniques for extensive highway networks covering thousands of miles proves arduous and costly, and poses safety risks for crew members. Consequently, there exists a pressing need to develop more efficient methodologies for acquiring this data promptly, safely, and economically. Fortunately, with the increasing availability of high-resolution images and recent strides in computer vision and object detection technologies, automated extraction of roadway geometry features has become feasible.

In traditional human living environment landscape design, the establishment of three-dimensional models is an essential step for designers to intuitively present the spatial relationships of design elements, as well as a foundation for conducting landscape analysis on the site. Rapidly and effectively generating beautiful and realistic landscape spaces is a significant challenge faced by designers. Although generative design has been widely applied in related fields, they mostly generate three-dimensional models through the restriction of indicator parameters. However, the elements of landscape design are complex and have unique requirements, making it difficult to generate designs from the perspective of indicator limitations. To address these issues, this study proposes a park space generative design system based on deep learning technology. This system generates design plans based on the topological relationships of landscape elements, then vectorizes the plan element information, and uses Grasshopper to generate three-dimensional models while synchronously fine-tuning parameters, rapidly completing the entire process from basic site conditions to model effect analysis. Experimental results show that: (1) the system, with the aid of AI-assisted technology, can rapidly generate space green space schemes that meet the designer's perspective based on site conditions; (2) this study has vectorized and three-dimensionalized various types of landscape design elements based on semantic information; (3) the analysis and visualization module constructed in this study can perform landscape analysis on the generated three-dimensional models and produce node effect diagrams, allowing users to modify the design in real time based on the effects, thus enhancing the system's interactivity.

Optimal management of cross-asset infrastructure is a complex problem that requires adept inspection and maintenance policies addressing stochastic degradation impacts. According to the 2021 ASCE infrastructure report card [1], the US infrastructure is in fair to poor condition, earning a cumulative grade of C-, with components nearing the end of their useful lives and at high risk of failure. Pavements and bridges are indicative examples of inadequate infrastructure. One in every five miles of pavements is in poor condition, and 7.5% of bridges are structurally deficient. Economic analyses indicate that the US Department of Transportation fell 50% short of the funds required to sustain the national transportation system [1], which is also reflected in the available resources at individual State transportation agencies. The Virginia Department of Transportation, for example, reported that 50% of the State's bridges have exceeded their useful lives, and the required funds to replace them are five times greater than the estimated available funds over the next fifty years [2]. Inspection and Maintenance (I&M) policies are therefore indispensable towards efficiently distributing available economic and environmental resources for transportation systems. Making optimal decisions in complex and uncertain environments presents a variety of difficulties, including heterogeneity of asset classes, a high number of components resulting in vast state and action spaces, unreliable observations, limited availability of resources, and several related risks. Optimal solutions that define inspection and maintenance policies should thus incorporate concepts such as (i) online and offline data learning, (ii) imperfect information support, (iii) stochastic action outcomes considerations, and (iv) optimization of long-term goals under multiple constraints (e.g., safety targets or resource constraints).

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 from 19 asphalt pavements with different crude oil sources on a 2.038 km long full-scale field accelerated pavement test track (RIOHTrack, Road Track Institute) 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, Average Mean Absolute Error, and Average Mean Absolute Percentage Error 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.

Researchers created DribbleBot, a system for in-the-wild dribbling on diverse natural terrains including sand, gravel, mud, and snow using onboard sensing and computing. In addition to these football feats, such robots may someday aid humans in search-and-rescue missions. If you've ever played soccer with a robot, it's a familiar feeling. A four-legged robot is hustling toward you, dribbling with determination. Researchers from MIT's Improbable Artificial Intelligence Lab, part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), have developed a legged robotic system that can dribble a soccer ball under the same conditions as humans.