Assessment and Feedback Control of Paving Quality of Earth-Rock Dam Based on OODA Loop

Paving thickness and evenness are two key factors that affect the paving operation quality of earth-rock dams. However, in the recent study, both of the key factors characterising the paving quality were measured using finite point random sampling, which resulted in subjectivity in the detection and a lag in the feedback control. At the same time, the on-site control of the paving operation quality based on experience results in a poor and unreliable paving quality. To address the above issues, in this study, a novel assessment and feedback control framework for the paving operation quality based on the observe–orient–decide–act (OODA) loop is presented. First, in the observation module, a cellular automaton is used to convert the location of the bulldozer obtained by monitoring devices into the paving thickness of the levelling layer. Second, in the orient module, the learning automaton is used to update the state of the corresponding and surrounding cells. Third, in the decision module, an overall path planning method is developed to realise feedback control of the paving thickness and evenness. Finally, in the act module, the paving thickness and evenness of the entire work unit are calculated and compared to their control thresholds to determine whether to proceed with the next OODA loop. The experiments show that the proposed method can maintain the paving thickness less than the designed standard value and effectively prevent the occurrence of ultra-thick or ultra-thin phenomena. Furthermore, the paving evenness is improved by 21.5% as compared to that obtained with the conventional paving quality control method. The framework of the paving quality assessment and feedback control proposed in this paper has extensive popularisation and application value for the same paving construction scene.