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Sustainable Road Construction and Maintenance and Disaster Prevention

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

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2026 | Viewed by 642

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
National Engineering Research Center for Highway Maintenance Equipment, Chang’an University, Xi’an 710064, China
Interests: construction machinery design, manufacture, test, and validation; asphalt pavement recycling materials, technology, and equipment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
School of Electronic Information Engineering, China West Normal University, Nanchong, China
Interests: ground penetrating radar (GPR); deep learning; road diseases; sustainable infrastructure; tunnel inspection; intelligent detection; non-destructivetesting

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Guest Editor
School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, Foshan University, Foshan, China
Interests: road engineering; NDT technique; road construction and maintenance; GPR

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With the continuous improvement of infrastructure and the frequent occurrence of natural disasters—such as earthquakes, rainstorms, and mudslides—the development of highway transportation needs to accelerate its transformation from "incremental expansion" to a new stage of productive force development characterized by "quality improvement and efficiency enhancement". This requires an in-depth exploration of the significant impacts that climate, geological disasters, and the natural environment have on highways, as well as strategies to achieve intelligent disaster prevention and proactive reinforcement through technological means, thereby paving the way for sustainable development.

Infrastructure safety also faces a series of challenges. A systematic investigation of hidden risks and an assessment of the adaptability of engineering disaster prevention and mitigation measures are necessary to enhance highway safety and disaster resilience. The highway transportation network should incorporate sustainable development concepts throughout the entire lifecycle—planning, design, construction, maintenance, and operation—raising the overall development level and constructing a modern highway infrastructure system that is safe, reliable, resilient, durable, economical, and practical.

The purpose of this call for papers is to exchange recent scientific results related to highway and infrastructure design, construction, and maintenance under the theme “Sustainable Road Construction and Maintenance and Disaster Prevention”.

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

  • Highway and infrastructure digitization;
  • Intelligent construction and maintenance;
  • Non-destructive fault detection for highways, bridges, and tunnel;
  • Intelligent defect identification

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Min Ye
Dr. Hongqiang Xiong
Dr. Xuetang Xiong
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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
  • highway and infrastructure
  • digitization
  • intelligent construction and maintenance
  • intelligent defect identification
  • non-destructive fault detection

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 22613 KB  
Article
Automated Multi-Scale Moisture Damage Detection in Asphalt Pavements Using GPR and YOLOv13: Application to the Jingang Expressway in Cambodia
by Yi Zhang, Hongwei Li and Min Ye
Sustainability 2026, 18(10), 5178; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18105178 - 21 May 2026
Viewed by 201
Abstract
Moisture damage is a common hidden distress in asphalt pavements in hot and rainy regions, where it can rapidly develop into severe surface deterioration if not detected in time. To address this issue, this study proposes an automated framework integrating ground-penetrating radar (GPR) [...] Read more.
Moisture damage is a common hidden distress in asphalt pavements in hot and rainy regions, where it can rapidly develop into severe surface deterioration if not detected in time. To address this issue, this study proposes an automated framework integrating ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data and the YOLOv13 model for multi-scale moisture damage detection on the Jingang Expressway in Cambodia. A total of 1672 GPR images containing moisture damage were collected through field surveys using a 2.3 GHz GPR system. Based on field statistical analysis, the detected damage was classified into three scale levels: large-scale (>2 m), medium-scale (0.8–2 m), and tiny-scale (<0.8 m). Several recent YOLO variants were compared, and YOLOv13s was identified as the optimal model, achieving the best balance between detection accuracy and inference efficiency, with an mAP@0.5 of 85.3% and an FPS of 48. The proposed method was further validated through laboratory and field tests. The results indicate that the developed framework can effectively detect and localize multi-scale moisture damage under practical engineering conditions, providing a non-destructive and efficient approach for pavement condition assessment in hot and rainy regions. By enabling early-stage detection of moisture damage deterioration, the proposed framework may contribute to more sustainable pavement maintenance and long-term transportation infrastructure management. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Road Construction and Maintenance and Disaster Prevention)
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