Abstract:

The texture of the asphalt road pavement may be described using the fractal theory due to its complexity and selfsimilarity on microscale. The microtopography of the asphalt pavement structure depths in the vertical direction was analyzed by the fractal interpolation method based on the iterated function. The optimal vertical scaling factors of the affine transformation in the iterated function system were acquired by a genetic algorithm to calculate the fractal dimensions. The profile altitude data of 4 different alphalt pavement specimens were acquired by a highprecision laser range finder. The acquired data were used to analyze the relationships between the fractal dimension and the pavement mean structure depth, the arithmetic mean error, as well as the rootmeansquare error, and to simulate the fractal curve of pavement structure depth variation by the interpolation functions.

Key words: highway engineering, asphalt road pavement, micro-topography, fractal, genetic algorithm