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Sustainable Road Survey and Maintenance: New Tools, Technologies and Practices
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Sustainable Road Survey and Maintenance: New Tools, Technologies and Practices

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 8 September 2024 | Viewed by 3132

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Giuseppe Sollazzo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Engineering, University of Messina, 98166 Messina, Italy
Interests: infrastructure; pavement engineering; pavement asset management; pavement quality surveys; performance indicators using modern monitoring technologies; analysis methodologies; and artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques; BIM (Building Information Modeling) applications for highway smart design; pavement maintenance optimization; sustainability of road materials and pavements
Prof. Dr. Kelvin CP Wang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology, Oklahoma State University, 201 Advanced Technology Research Center, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA
Interests: automated technologies for pavement survey; pavement data systems for design and management; the automated cracking survey; 3D laser-based imaging sensors; AI-based software solutions; sub-mm and deep-sub-mm 3D laser imaging for comprehensive pavement distress surveys; pavement safety evaluation based on the rapid advances of deep-learning-based techniques
Dr. Davide Lo Presti

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Engineering, University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Ed. 8, 90128 Palermo, Italy
Interests: sustainability; life cycle assessment; recycling; bitumen; asphalt; smart infrastructure; road pavements; railway trackbeds
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Road infrastructures are useful elements for effective social and economic development in many countries. In recent years, road agencies have faced challenges in guaranteeing adequate functional and safety features of their networks, owing to the increase in traffic demand, aging conditions, and difficulties in maintenance. Additional issues and opportunities related to climate change and technological development have arisen. In fact, considering the current situation, researchers all over the world should investigate novel opportunities to improve infrastructure and users’ satisfaction and safety. The threats may transform into opportunities, improving and accelerating strategic innovation processes.

To maximize the overall quality of road networks, all the phases related to maintenance activities (from surveying and monitoring, up to intervention planning, design, and execution) must be studied.

On the one hand, recent international policies that support sustainability advocate for environmental and circular economy solutions.

On the other hand, the improvement of survey systems and processing frameworks, fuelled by the developments in technological equipment and computer-based automated elaboration approaches, can simplify infrastructure management and effectively support road administrators.

Then, road agencies and governments must develop their management systems to guarantee optimal design solutions, while recalibrate the reference intervention alternatives by using environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable materials and methods. This may be also achieved by identifying and studying alternative paving materials to ensure that they have similar or better mechanical and durability performances than those of traditional ones, with higher economic, environmental, and sustainability advantages.

The attention of the scientific community should be focused on these aspects to encourage the evolution of the entire sector towards better and more sustainable solutions. Researchers must face the challenges and opportunities of sustainable road survey and maintenance to produce new tools, technologies, and practices. The results of the research will efficiently support road agencies and governments in improving infrastructures, without affecting and critically impacting ecosystems and available resources.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Improvements of Pavement Management Systems, overcoming the current limitations and obstacles in their effective adoption worldwide;
  • Evolution of the management solutions, exploiting potential advantages of modern approaches and processes, such as BIM (Building Information Modelling), representing a clear breakthrough;
  • Optimization of survey technologies for the detailed monitoring of structural and functional features of road elements by further developing and improving high-performance survey systems;
  • Effective conceptualization and definition of the Smart Road environment to overcome current limitations (uncertainties in data needs, optimal sensors, energy and data transmission technologies, maintenance and durability issues) for real-time and widespread monitoring using embedded and moving sensors;
  • Improvement and optimization of automated analysis techniques and procedures, exploiting and fully controlled deep learning and machine learning solutions, aiming to support road administrators in their various tasks (from distress and anomaly identification to optimal intervention selection and scheduling);
  • Refining of modern materials and production and construction solutions, even considering non-traditional and alternative paving materials, aiming to reduce emissions and impacts on the environment and humans, favouring the definition of innovative methods and approaches for reducing resource and fuel consumption, promoting reuse, recycling, and overall sustainability;
  • Extending and facilitating the adoption of sustainability and circularity assessment tools (such as Life Cycle Assessment or Life Cycle Cost Analysis) to determine performance-based variables and other relevant factors.

Dr. Giuseppe Sollazzo
Prof. Dr. Kelvin CP Wang
Dr. Davide Lo Presti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • sustainability
  • asset management
  • pavement management systems
  • BIM
  • LCA
  • modern road surveys
  • deep learning
  • smart roads
  • novel paving materials

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

18 pages, 3087 KiB  
Article
Development and Evaluation of Vegetable Resin Bio-Binders as Technological Alternatives to Bitumen
by Manuel De Rose, Rosolino Vaiana, Cesare Oliviero Rossi and Paolino Caputo
Sustainability 2024, 16(6), 2437; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16062437 - 15 Mar 2024
Viewed by 738
Abstract
Recently, the feasibility of using bio-materials to reduce or completely replace the use of bitumen in asphalt mixture has gained increasing attention. Amongst others, an interesting solution is represented by the use of wood co-products with mineral or vegetable oils. This research focuses [...] Read more.
Recently, the feasibility of using bio-materials to reduce or completely replace the use of bitumen in asphalt mixture has gained increasing attention. Amongst others, an interesting solution is represented by the use of wood co-products with mineral or vegetable oils. This research focuses on the development of bio-binders using vegetable resin (VR) in unmodified form and waste olive oil (WOO) as the main components; in order to optimize the rheological properties of the blends, crumb rubber from end-of-life tyres (CR), Styrene-Butadiene-Styrene (SBS) and polyethylene waxes (PEW) are used as additives. In particular, this investigation focuses on studying different oil/rosin ratios and polymer contents to provide a clear framework on this bio-binder solution; conventional bituminous binders are taken as a reference. The alternative binders are characterized in terms of conventional properties such as penetration depth and softening point, as well as rheological response. Finally, two of the bio-binders studied are selected with the aim of assessing the mechanical properties of the resulting sustainable asphalt mixture using the Marshall Stability test and the Indirect Tensile Strength test, comparing the results with the threshold values set by an Italian road agency. Thus, this research represents a preliminary analysis of the potential application of bio-binder mixtures within the specification limits imposed by road agencies. Although this research represents a first attempt, the results are promising and prove to be worthy of further investigations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Road Survey and Maintenance: New Tools, Technologies and Practices)
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14 pages, 3083 KiB  
Article
Predicting Concrete Pavement Condition for Sustainable Management: Unveiling the Development of Distresses through Machine Learning
by Donghyuk Jung, Jinhyuk Lee, Cheolmin Baek, Deoksoon An and Sunglin Yang
Sustainability 2024, 16(2), 573; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16020573 - 09 Jan 2024
Viewed by 803
Abstract
This study presents a machine learning model for predicting representative surface distresses (crack, durability, patching, joint spall) in concrete pavements, focusing on South Korean examples. It thoroughly analyzes specific distress types using time series data to understand their development over time, aiming to [...] Read more.
This study presents a machine learning model for predicting representative surface distresses (crack, durability, patching, joint spall) in concrete pavements, focusing on South Korean examples. It thoroughly analyzes specific distress types using time series data to understand their development over time, aiming to surpass traditional regression methods in forecasting pavement conditions. The research fills a gap by applying machine learning algorithms to detailed long-term data, enhancing the accuracy of distress progression predictions, which is crucial for efficient pavement management. A notable aspect of this study is the use of particle filtering, recognized for its effective resampling in analyzing time series data. To validate predictions, we compared the results from particle filtering with those from traditional regression models, long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The accuracy varied significantly, with differences ranging from 3.32% to 23.64%, indicating particle filtering’s suitability for time-series-based pavement condition predictions. These findings are especially relevant in the context of current image-based machine learning and AI research in pavement distress detection and prediction. This research offers a comprehensive reference that is especially valuable due to the lack of studies using long-term usage data, thereby making a significant contribution to pavement management research and practice. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Road Survey and Maintenance: New Tools, Technologies and Practices)
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30 pages, 7309 KiB  
Article
Modelling the Environmental and Economic Life Cycle Performance of Maximizing Asphalt Recycling on Road Pavement Surfaces in Europe
by Gabriella Buttitta, Gaspare Giancontieri, Tony Parry and Davide Lo Presti
Sustainability 2023, 15(19), 14546; https://doi.org/10.3390/su151914546 - 07 Oct 2023
Viewed by 1159
Abstract
The road pavement industry, worldwide, has often shown reluctance in quickly implementing innovative practices; however, in the case of raw material consumption, a cultural change is necessary and, in this sense, sustainability assessment could play a major role. Along these lines, this research [...] Read more.
The road pavement industry, worldwide, has often shown reluctance in quickly implementing innovative practices; however, in the case of raw material consumption, a cultural change is necessary and, in this sense, sustainability assessment could play a major role. Along these lines, this research study aims to provide evidence to all the involved stakeholders (material producers, pavement contractors, and road authorities) of how life cycle-based techniques can be crucial in evaluating whether the adoption of asphalt mixtures with high contents of reclaimed asphalt (RA) for wearing courses is actually a sustainable practice for major European roads. An evaluation framework composed of a life cycle assessment, to calculate the carbon footprint of both pavement materials and pavement activities, and a life cycle cost assessment, performed to determine the overall economic burden of the related road pavement surface courses and maintenance strategies over a sixty-year analysis period, is presented and applied to selected case studies. These were developed together with three major European national road authorities and include scenarios involving the construction of road surfaces with asphalt mixtures containing up to 90% RA. Results have shown that whenever high-content RA mixes do not under-perform against conventional mixtures, up to 50% CO2eq savings can be registered and up to 60% economic cost reductions can be reported. The durability of road pavement layers remains a key parameter for any road pavement sustainability assessment exercises; therefore, in order to adapt the obtained results to other contexts, researchers should always consider conducting a sensitivity analysis of the reference service life and/or road authorities should somehow request road pavement durability as a pre-requisite within procurement practices. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Road Survey and Maintenance: New Tools, Technologies and Practices)
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