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AI-Based Material Design, Performance Evaluation and Construction Quality Control of Asphalt Pavement

A special issue of Materials (ISSN 1996-1944). This special issue belongs to the section "Construction and Building Materials".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 March 2026 | Viewed by 917

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Transportation, Southeast University, 2 Sipailou, Nanjing 210096, China
Interests: multi-physical/multi-scale characterization of pavement materials; genome encoding and AI-driven design of materials; intelligent construction and monitoring of structure
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
School of Traffic and Transportation, Shijiazhuang Tiedao University, Shijiazhuang 050043, China
Interests: multiscale mechanical design of asphalt/cement-based material; intelligent monitoring; resource utilization design of solid waste materials; reliability assessment of material design
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor

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Guest Editor Assistant
School of Civil Engineering, Central South University Railway Campus, Changsha 410075, China
Interests: structural durability; bayesian updating; structural reliability; value of information; decision making
College of Civil Science and Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225127, China
Interests: asphalt pavement recycling; sustainable pavement materials; mechnical performance evaluation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Amid the dual challenges of accelerated aging of asphalt pavement and the deepening implementation of the "dual-carbon" strategy (carbon peak and carbon neutrality), the development of pavement materials that combine ‌green and low-carbon attributes, environmental adaptability, and long-term durability‌ has became a critical solution to mitigating escalating challenges posed by heavy traffic loads and extreme weather conditions in complex service environments. Current research on ‌asphalt pavement materials‌ mainly relies on scientists' continuous exploration of complex theories and the gradual accumulation of experimental data, a process often characterized by ‌long cycles and low efficiency‌, severely hindering the rapid development and practical application of ‌performance-oriented new-material design‌. With the rapid advancement of ‌artificial intelligence (AI)‌, guided by the ‌Materials Genome Initiative (MGI)‌ framework and empowered by ‌high-throughput computing and AI-driven approaches‌, it is now possible to overcome the ‌spatiotemporal limitations of traditional trial-and-error material design methods in pavement‌. This enables ‌precise analysis and inverse design of composition-structure-performance relationships in materials‌. Such an ‌AI-aided paradigm‌, which ‌integrates data-driven approaches with fundamental physical mechanisms‌, dramatically improves both ‌the efficiency of performance-targeted pavement material design‌ and its ‌inherent adaptive capabilities‌.

This Special Issue, entitled “AI-Based Material Design, Performance Evaluation and Construction Quality Control of Asphalt Pavement”, aims to gather original research papers related to the performance prediction and intelligent design of bituminous materials. The scope of this Special Issue includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

  • High-throughput computing and evaluation of asphalt/cement-based material;
  • Genome encoding and AI-driven design of asphalt/cement-based material;
  • Multi-physical/multi-scale characterization of asphalt/cement-based material;
  • Mechanical inversion and reverse design of asphalt/cement-based material;
  • ‌Intelligent construction and quality assessment of pavement structure;
  • Intelligent monitoring and risk assessment technology of pavement structure;
  • Green and sustainable materials design and durability assessment of pavements.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Applied Sciences.

Dr. Xunhao Ding
Dr. Yanshun Jia
Dr. Wensheng Wang
Guest Editors

Dr. Xiong Xiao
Guest Editor Assistant

Dr. Bo Li
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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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. Materials 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 2600 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

  • asphalt/cement-based material
  • high-throughput computing
  • genome interpretation of materials
  • AI-driven inverse design of materials
  • pavement performance evaluation
  • green and sustainable materials
  • intelligent construction and monitoring

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 3221 KB  
Article
GPR Feature Enhancement of Asphalt Pavement Hidden Defects Using Computational-Efficient Image Processing Techniques
by Shengjia Xie, Jingsong Chen, Ming Cai, Zhiqiang Cheng, Siqi Wang and Yixiang Zhang
Materials 2025, 18(18), 4400; https://doi.org/10.3390/ma18184400 - 20 Sep 2025
Viewed by 195
Abstract
Hyperbolic reflection features from ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data have been recognized as essential indicators for detecting hidden defects in the asphalt pavement. Computer vision and deep learning algorithms have been developed to detect and enhance the hyperbolic features of hidden defects. However, migrating [...] Read more.
Hyperbolic reflection features from ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data have been recognized as essential indicators for detecting hidden defects in the asphalt pavement. Computer vision and deep learning algorithms have been developed to detect and enhance the hyperbolic features of hidden defects. However, migrating existing hyperbolic feature detection methods using raw GPR data results in inaccurate predictions. Pre-processing raw GPR data using straightforward image processing methods could enhance the reflection features for fast and accurate hyperbolic detection during real-time GPR measurements. This study proposed accessible and straightforward image processing methods as GPR data preprocessing steps (such as the Sobel edge detector and histogram equalization) to assist existing computer vision algorithms for reflection feature enhancement during the GPR survey. Field tests were conducted, and several image processing methods with existing standard image processing libraries were applied. The proposed regions of the identified hyperbola signal-to-noise ratio (RIHSNR) were used to quantify the enhancement performance of hyperbolic feature detectability. Applying Sobel edge detection and Otsu’s thresholding to GPR data significantly improves detection accuracy and speed: mAP@0.5 rises from 0.65 to 0.85 for Faster R-CNN and from 0.72 to 0.88 for CBAM-YOLOv8 using the proposed computer vision methods as preprocessing steps. At the same time, inference time drops to 30 ms and 25 ms, respectively. Full article
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