Applicability of Fuzzy Logic and Artificial Neural Network for Unpaved Airfield Surface Bearing Strength Prediction

The main objective of this paper is to describe a building process of a model predicting the soil strength at unpaved airport surfaces (unpaved runways, safety areas in runway proximity, runway strips, and runway end safety areas). The reason for building this model is to partially substitute frequent and meticulous inspections of an airport movement area comprising the bearing strength evaluation and provide an efficient tool to organize surface maintenance. Since the process of building such a model is complex for a physical model, it is anticipated that it might be addressed by a statistical model instead. Therefore, fuzzy logic (FL) and artificial neural network (ANN) capabilities are investigated and compared with linear regression function (LRF). Large data sets comprising the bearing strength and meteorological characteristics are applied to train the likely model variations to be subsequently compared with the application of standard statistical quantitative parameters. All the models prove that the inclusion of antecedent soil strength as an additional model input has an immense impact on the increase in model accuracy. Although the M7 model out of the ANN group displays the best performance, the M3 model is considered for practical implications being less complicated and having fewer inputs. In general, both the ANN and FL models outperform the LRF models well in all the categories. The FL models perform almost equally as well as the ANN but with slightly decreased accuracy.