Estimating the Bitumen Ratio to be Used in Highway Asphalt Concrete by Machine Learning

Abstract

Hot mix asphalt, which is frequently used in road pavements, contains bitumen in certain proportions. This bitumen ratio varies according to the layers in the road pavements. The bitumen ratio in each pavement is usually estimated by the Marshall design method. However, this method is costly as well as time-consuming. In this study, the Naive Bayes method, which is a machine learning algorithm, was used to estimate the bitumen ratio practically. In the study, a total of 102 asphalt concrete designs were examined, which were taken from the wearing course, binder course, and asphalt concrete base course and stone mastic asphalt wearing course layers. Each road pavement layer was divided into three different classes according to the bitumen ratios and the algorithm was trained with machine learning. Then the bitumen ratio was estimated for each data set. As a result of this process, the bitumen ratios of the layers were estimated with an accuracy between 75% and 90%. In this study, it was revealed that the bitumen ratio in the road pavement layers could be estimated practically and economically.