Automation and Computational Intelligence for Road Maintenance and Management

1Concepts and Foundations Automation and Emerging Technologies

1.1 Introduction

The term “automation” generally refers to a set of automated processes on an input based on expert‐inspired thinking. In a broader and more specialized field of management, the term includes automatic data retrieval (DR) and intelligent digital data processing (DP) to understand and quantify the situation. The input data to these systems are a set of numbers that are transmitted online or offline using advanced hardware and even a single image processor. Figure 1.1 shows a simple structure of an automated system for determining road conditions (at Amir Kabir University of Technology, Tehran Polytechnic), which is used for the automation in infrastructure management. Automation encompasses a range of activities from information extraction to robotic navigation, data analysis, solution presentation and knowledge discovery, and knowledge learning and self‐learning.

Data on the condition of an infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, railroad tracks, or a microscopic image of a bitumen mixture automatically with the machine, are first converted into digital format and stored as input in computer memory or transferred online to the analyzer software. These digital data can be processed or displayed and controlled simultaneously or on a high‐resolution monitor. In general, the process of digitization of road infrastructure scans includes all operations of digitization, storage, processing, and ...