Considering the Spatial Structure of the Road Network in Pavement Deterioration Modeling

Abstract

Pavement deterioration modeling is important in providing information with respect to the future state of the road network and in determining the needs of preventive maintenance or rehabilitation treatments. This research incorporated the spatial dependence of the 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 the 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 dataset with more than a half million observations taken from the Pavement Management Information System maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation. The promising comparison results indicate that pavement deterioration prediction models perform better when the spatial relationship is considered.