Development of Pavement Distress Deterioration Prediction Models for Urban Road Network Using Genetic Programming

The objective of the present study is to develop models to predict the deterioration of pavement distress of the urban road network. Genetic programming (GP) has been used to develop five models for the prediction of pavement distress: Model 1 for the cracking progression, Model 2 for the ravelling progression, Model 3 for the pothole progression, Model 4 for the rutting progression, and Model 5 for the roughness progression. The data have been collected from the roads of Patiala City, Punjab, India; during the years 2012-2015, the network of 16 roads have been selected for the data collection purposes. The data have been divided into two sets, that is, training dataset (data collected during the years 2012 and 2013) and validation dataset (data collected during the years 2014 and 2015). The two fitness functions have been used for the evaluation of the models, that is, coefficient of determination (R-2) and root mean square error (RMSE), and it is inferred that GP models predict with high accuracy for pavement distress and help the decision makers for adequate and timely fund allocations for preservation of the urban road network.