Development of Pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation Decision Model by Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH)

Abstract

Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH), was proposed by Ivakhnenko in 1967, is based on the principles of heuristic self-organization that is developed to solve complex problems with large dimensionality, such as pavement maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) decisions. In the paper, an empirical study is conducted to develop M&R decision model by using GMDH. Pavement distress surveys were performed on seven county roads by experienced pavement engineers of Taiwan Highway Bureau (THB). For each road section, the severity and coverage of existing distresses and required M&R treatment were separately recorded. The analytical database consisting of 2,348 records (2,115 records for model development and 233 records for model testing) are established to develop and test the M&R decision model. The finding shows that the total accuracy of proposed model is 0.940 based on the testing records. It illustrates that the GMDH-based M&R decision model certainly can make pavement knowledge extraction systematically, successful, and easy-to-use even for the complex M&R decision problems.