A Predictive Effect of Additives on Asphalt Mixture Performance by Using Artificial Neural Network

The low resistance of asphalt mixtures to dynamic loads results in fatigue cracks, rutting, and ultimately reduced service life of the pavement. Hence, advanced countries are looking for new ways to build and maintain roads, as well as efforts to use new technologies to upgrade old pavements, indicating the attention of these countries to maintaining the status of roads at the optimum level. One of the methods for modifying bituminous and asphalt mixtures is the use of a variety of additives. The additives are used because bitumen cannot be used in all Weather and loading conditions. Iran, with its four season climate, experiences special weather effects on most of the development projects. Road pavement is one of the most influential projects in this regard. In addition to testing, using an artificial neural network can be a good solution to reduce costs and time to results evaluation. In this paper, along with the study of the effects of various additives on the functional properties of asphalt mixtures, the use of artificial neural network to predict the different properties of asphalt mix is also discussed.