PREDICTING THE RHEOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF BITUMEN-FILLER MASTIC USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK METHODS

Abstract

This study was conducted to develop two types of artificial neural network (ANN) model to predict the rheological properties of bitumen-filler mastic in terms of the complex modulus and phase angle. Two types of ANN models were developed namely; (i) a multilayer feed-forward neural network model and (ii) a radial basis function network model. This study was also conducted to evaluate the accuracy of both types of models in predicting the rheological properties of bitumen-filler mastics by means of statistical parameters such as the coefficient of determination (R2), mean absolute error (MAE), mean squared error (MSE) and root mean squared error (RMSE) for every developed model. A set of dynamic shear rheometer (DSR) test data was used on a range of the bitumen-filler mastics with three filler types (limestone, cement and grit stone) and two filler concentrations (35 and 65% by mass). Based on the analysis performed, it was found that both models were able to predict the complex modulus and phase angle of bitumen-filler mastics with the average R2 value exceeding 0.98. A comparison between the two types of models showed that the radial basis function network model has a higher accuracy than multilayer feed-forward neural network model with a higher value of R2 and lower value of MAE, MSE and RMSE. It can be concluded that the ANN model can be used as an alternative method to predict the rheological properties of bitumen-filler mastic.