Backcalculation of pavement layer moduli from falling weight deflectometer data using an artificial neural network

Abstract

Efforts have been made in this paper to backcalculate the in situ elastic moduli of asphalt pavement from synthetically derived falling weight deflectometer (FWD) deflections at seven equidistant points. An artificial neural network (ANN) is used as a tool for backcalculation in this work. The ANN is observed to backcalculate layer moduli, both from normal as well as noisy deflection basins, with better accuracy compared with other software, namely, EVERCALC and ExPaS. EVERCALC is a backcalculation software downloaded from the Internet and ExPaS is a backcalculation algorithm developed in-house, based on a “search and expand” approach. Work have been extended further to develop ANN models that can predict a possible rigid layer at the bottom of the pavement and can directly predict the remaining life of the pavement without backcalculating the layer moduli. Finally, a reliability analysis is performed to quantify the performance of backcalculation using an ANN.