Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research

ISSN: 0282-7581 (Print) 1651-1891 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sfor20

New Strategies for Estimation of Cut and Fill Areas

in Road Design with Different Ground Cross-
section Offsets

Razieh Babapour, Ramin Naghdi, Ismael Ghajar & Reza Ghodsi

To cite this article: Razieh Babapour, Ramin Naghdi, Ismael Ghajar & Reza Ghodsi (2017): New
Strategies for Estimation of Cut and Fill Areas in Road Design with Different Ground Cross-section
Offsets, Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research, DOI: 10.1080/02827581.2017.1338748

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2017.1338748

Accepted author version posted online: 05

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Publisher: Taylor & Francis & Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Journal: Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research

DOI: 10.1080/02827581.2017.1338748

New Strategies for Estimation of Cut and Fill Areas in Road Design with Different

Ground Cross-section Offsets

Razieh Babapour1, Ramin Naghdi2‫٭‬, Ismael Ghajar3, Reza Ghodsi4

1
PhD candidate, Department of Forestry, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Guilan,

P.O. Box 1144, Sowmeh Sara, Iran. Phone number: +98-0919-4899599

Email: razieh_babapour@yahoo.com
2*
Corresponding author, Associate professor, Department of Forestry, Faculty of Natural

Resources, University of Guilan, P.O. Box 1144, Sowmeh Sara, Iran. Phone number: +98-

0911-1380108 Email: rnaghdi@guilan.ac.ir

3
Assistant professor, Department of Forestry, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of

Guilan, P.O. Box 1144, Sowmeh Sara, Iran. Phone number: +98-0911-3304989

Email: i.ghajar@yahoo.in
4
Associate professor, Engineering Department, Central Connecticut State University, USA,

phone number: +98-0912- 4933826

Email: rghodsi@gmail.com
 New Strategies for Estimation of Cut and Fill Areas in Road Design with Different

Ground Cross-section Offsets

Abstract

Earthwork operations accounted for great amount of forest road construction costs. Any

optimization in planning road profile needs a reliable objective function that calculates

earthwork volume in an appropriate time and accuracy. This study aimed at incorporating the

shape of the ground cross sections in calculating cut/fill areas using three alternative methods

including: Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and

heuristic programming in MATLAB environment. The accuracy of results was validated via

AutoCAD as a manual method for area calculation of road’s cross section. Trapezoidal

method applied to calculate the area of cut/fill in the heuristic method. Paired sample T-Test

and statistical analysis (ANOVA) with confidence level of 0.95 indicated that the heuristic

method not only reduced computing time but also provided accurate estimations as same as

the manual AutoCAD based method. It can be concluded that although MLR and ANN

estimations were as well as AutoCAD results within a reasonable time, they need to be

retrained by adding, removing or changing entrance parameters.

Key Words: Forest road, Earthwork volume, Artificial Neural Network, MATLAB, Multiple

Linear regression, heuristic.

2
Introduction

Forest roads are the most costly structures in forestry and play a crucial role in managing

forest resources. Optimal design of forest road profile can efficiently reduce earth work

volume. Optimal design of forest road profile is inevitable in mountainous forests where

more excavation is needed than flat areas and consequently more construction cost is usually

involved. According to the general form of forest road cross section, each cross section has

its own natural ground shape (varied from a flat surface to steep side slope). On the other

hand, vertical distance of road surface from natural ground surface could change from each

cross section to another depending on the ground shapes (figure 1). This variability influences

the volume of cut/fill in forest road construction. What is done in practice (as an exact

method with real results) is an expert-based drawing of road profile AutoCAD. After

calculation of earth work operation for a number of road profile variants, expert selects one of

them as the most appropriate alternative that should be constructed in the field. When

drawing road profile, each cross section can be located on many possible heights (for

example between +5 to -5m above and below ground). So, the problem is to generate a

framework to calculate cut/fill areas in each cross section. It is clear that manual drawing the

road profile could not ensure an optimal solution for this problem. The general aim in

drawing the road profile is to minimize the total volume of earth work. To perform such

optimization process, a function that calculates cut/fill area of each cross section form with a

specified vertical distance from natural ground is essential core of optimization program.

Otherwise, manual calculation of cut/fill area could not be used in an automatic planning of

3
forest road profile because it is a consuming task and a mainly a real-time calculation is

needed through the optimization process.

[Figure 1]

After collecting the basically needed data (terrain slope and ground elevation), road design

has three different stages (Hare et al. 2014): 1) Planning road horizontal alignment 2)

designing vertical alignment of road profile, using heuristic or meta-heuristic algorithms

(Fwa et al. 2002; Aruga et al. 2005) or by using both heuristic algorithms and nonlinear

programming (Lee & Cheng 2001) and 3) optimizing the earthwork volume. Applying

imprecise methods may result in inaccurate estimates of the optimal earthwork cost, due to

ignoring the shape of ground cross sections which surprisingly affects the cut/fill volumes,

especially in mountainous regions like forest areas in the northern Iran. Although many

models used to optimize horizontal (Shaw & Howard 1982; Trietsch 1987; Brauers et al.

2008) and vertical alignments (Fwa 1989), some 3D designing models merge these three

stages in a single process, using multi-objective genetic algorithm (Kim et al. 2003; Jha &

Maji 2007). A test of 3-D alignment optimization in a complex mountainous terrain showed

those models can find very good solutions in regions with complex topography (Jha &

Schonfeld 2004). In many other research works, optimizing earthwork volume was

performed via employing a linear programming approach (Stark & Nicholls 1971; Mayer &

Stark 1981; Hare et al. 2011). Applying LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is one of the

fastest growing systems in the field that can provide a high-resolution and accurate DEM of

forested areas (Akay et al. 2004). Contreras et al. (2012) developed a computerized model to

accurately estimate earthwork volumes for the proposed forest roads using DEM by applying

it on three roads with different ground slopes. They tested the effect of the space between

every two consecutive cross sections on precise of results and compare their achievements

with those of the end area method. They clarified the negative effects of long distances

4
between cross sections on the results in spite of the high ability of LIDAR on accurate

estimation of earthwork volumes.

Aruga et al. (2005) applied two heuristic techniques, genetic algorithm (GA) and Tabu search

(TS), in their model to design a forest road profile with minimum construction and

maintenance costs, both with an embedded linear programming routine to allocate earthwork.

Then they extended the model to optimize a forest road profile while changing heights at

control points as well as the placement of control points considering the effect of the

placement and the number of control points. They concluded that both GA and TS found

good solutions within a reasonable runtime.

Jha and Schonfeld (2000) integrated genetic algorithms with GIS using specialized dynamic

link libraries enabling dynamic communication during the search for optimum. Result of the

study showed that while such integration allows direct use of real maps and databases, it

significantly increases the computation time by increasing the number of geographic data as

entrances of model.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are another type of soft computing and data driven

techniques that because of their heuristic problem-solving capabilities, have been applied

successfully for modeling in many fields of geological engineering problems (Shahin et al.

2008). As ANN has a great potential in building such models, this study applied it to model

the cut/fill areas in different slopes. ANN is applicable in virtually every situation in which a

relationship between the input and output variables exists, even when that relationship is very

complex and not easy to articulate in common statistical terms (Aron 1992). ANN has some

special abilities: it is independent to the normalizing data (Civco & Wanug 1994) with high

speed (because of parallel processing), easy to adapt in the new situations and able in solving

the problems that are not capable to simulation (Kia 2010). Exception of Peyrov et al (2014)

5
that applied ANN algorithm to predict forest road, there aren’t any other application of this

algorithm in designing of forest road. While it successfully applied in different fields of

forestry such as predicting the forest ages using TM photos (Jensen et al. 1999), morality of

Picea Abies stands (Hasenauer et al. 2001) and predicting the effective factors in felling time

(Karaman & Caliskan 2009). Tiryaki (2008), Babapour et al (2015) and Meulenkamp and

Grima (1999) used ANN engineering sciences and Ghajar et al (2012) used Adaptive Neuro-

Fuzzy Inference System as a combination of ANN and fuzzy logic theory in predicting rock

proportion. Aron (1992) applied ANN and slope-curvature model to predict forest roads

design.

The aim of present study is generating a framework to take the ground shape into account in

estimation of earthwork volume using three alternative methods including: MLR, ANN

prediction models and MATLAB heuristic programming based on detailed and

mathematically unrestrictive functions, for the cut/fill area, employing terrain slope

properties. These three alternative methods can determine the area of cut/fill for every cross

section by only taking the natural side slopes of ground and their length as input variables.

Auto CAD results (as an exact, but time consuming, manual method of calculating the

earthwork volume) just used to verify results of proposed methods for selecting the best one.

There were two reasons for modeling of cut/fill areas using ANN and MLR; first, there was

an assumption that despite of existing error in any estimation, a model can accelerate

earthwork calculations just by receiving limited properties of cross section in shorter time

than a pseudo-heuristic MATLAB code in that each cross section divided by numerous

trapezoidal and total area obtained by adding their areas; Second result of such modeling can

be compared with exact calculation of pseudo-heuristic code.

6
Materials and Methods

Study Site

The study was carried out in Khojedareh, a forest district covering approximately 1742 ha of

Shafaroud watershed in Guilan province- northern Iran (Figure 2). The area is located

between 480 44’ 36’’ and 480 49’ 58’’ of Longitude, and 370 37’ 23’’ and 370 42’ 31’’ of

latitude. The altitude range of the site is between 250 and 1,150 m above sea level.

From the view point of slope, 74% of the region has the slope of less than 70%. The soil

texture can be grouped in six classes of Sandy Loam, Sandy Clay Loam, Loam, Loamy Sand,

Clay Loam and Clay, with 57% share of sandy texture in the region. The area contains three

bedrock types include: Tuff, Basalt and Shale with 59% share of tuff bedrock.

[Figure 2]

Methodology

The influence of different ground slopes at every cross section on cut/fill areas were

investigated at first. To compute the cut/fill area based on ground profile at each cross

section, the exact locations of the cross sections (as control points) through the existing road

were surveyed (the map of the existing road and the data of study cross sections was in

access). The following five steps were performed:

1. Cut/fill Area Calculation in AutoCAD Map Environment

As shown in the figure 3, the area of cut/fill in each cross section was calculated in various

alternative heights of road surface at of 1m intervals up to 8 m above and under natural

ground in AutoCAD map environment.

7
For each cross section, standard single lane forest road with 3.5 m width, cut slope of 2:1, fill

slope of 4:5 were drawn in each offsets. The area values obtained from AutoCAD map were

used as base values to verify the results of three alternative methods (MLR, ANN and

heuristic) estimation.

[Figure 3]

2. Multiple Linear Regression

As first alternative method Multiple Linear Regression was used to determine the cut/fill

areas.

MLR estimates the coefficients of the linear equation involving one or more significant

independent variables to estimate the dependent variable value linearly. It should be noted

that in general, cut area mostly tends to zero at positive height and fill areas mostly lean to

zero at negative height (figure 4).

The data of modeling was the AutoCAD based cross sections data and the corresponding

calculated areas. In each cross section (figure 5), the Slopes of the natural ground profile,

their width (e.g. Xi) and the height (e.g. Yi) after the test of normality, homogeneity of

variance, and skewness were entered as independent variables to estimate cut/fill using linear

regression dialog box in SPSS ver.19 for windows (SPSS Inc., Chicago, USA). A separate

model was produced for each of dependent variables (i.e. cut and fill areas). The model

calculates cut/fill areas for each height alternative of road at each cross-section.

3. ANN Cut/Fill Area Estimation Model

Due to high generalization power and flexibility of Artificial Neural Network for nonlinear

data pattern, ANN as second alternative framework was employed to estimate cut/fill areas

for different offsets of ground profile. Neural networks was used in this research as follows:

8
There were concerned with establishing prediction models for the area of cut/fill, employing

the slopes (ai) of the ground profile, their height (Yi) and the height of road at control points

(Z) that was the AutoCAD based cross sections data and the corresponding calculated areas.

The feed forward back propagation network with two hidden layers and tangent sigmoid

transfer function were used to build the prediction models. The Levenberg–Marquardt

algorithm because of faming as a fastest method for training moderate-sized feed-forward

neural networks (Tiryaki 2008) was applied as learning algorithm. Before implementing,

input and output data was normalized and divided by training, validation, and test subsets.

The 20% of the data was taken for the validation set, 20% for the test set, and 60% for the

training set. The ANN model then was generated in MATLAB ver. 2012a environment.

The models’ performance could be evaluated using a large set of input–output data, and

parameters of the system could be fine-tuned in order to achieve a low generalization error

(Ghajar et al. 2010). In the present study data of 200 different cross sections were entered into

the best model of ANN network with the highest amount of R2 and low amount of RMSE for

estimating the area of cut/fill.

4. Heuristic Programming Cut/Fill

As third alternative method of estimating cut/fill areas, the heuristic method was done in

three steps as follows:

Natural grounds shape definition: At the first step, to model the elevation changes at both

sides of cross sections, as it shown in the figure 5, up and down slopes were divided to the

various parts based on natural breaks of the ground. The horizontal length (Xi) and the

elevation difference (Yi) and the angle of natural ground in each part was extracted in

AutoCAD map. For each cross section, the angels of up slope and down slope (au and ad) and

9
their length (uy and ly) which were extracted from AutoCAD maps, also were entered to

model as the input variables.

- The second step indicated the road cross section properties with its slopes in different cross-

sections as well as the heights of road placement. In this case, it was possible to find all

conjunctions of road slopes with natural ground using the standards of road construction in

Iran (figure 6).

Height offset between natural ground and road surface at cross sections could be located in

the range of -4.8m to +4.8m continuously. This concept was used for vertical alignment

modeling of road with a discretely 0.1 m offsets. Consequently, by changing the vertical

distance of road surface up and down in 0.1 m intervals, 97 possible road cross section forms

were generated (figure 4).

[Figure 4]

[Figure 5]

[Figure 6]

- In the final step, the calculation of cut/fill areas for each cross section was made by

summation of trapezoids areas at different offset levels of the ground profile (figure 7).

Trapezoidal method seems to be suitable at the detailed design level when better precision is

required. In trapezoidal method, at first the assumed area divided by various trapezoids with

same widths (figure 7) and the area of each trapezoid is calculated separately, then the total

(cut or fill) area is obtained from the summation of the trapezoids calculated areas. Cross-

sectional profiles under cut/fill conditions are considered here in more detail. The cut/fill

areas in every cross section are the output data for the model.

10
By implementation of trapezoidal method in the heuristic programming, the cut/fill areas

were estimated in 0.1 m interval between 4.8 m up and down the natural ground. According

to this point that the AutoCAD based earthwork volumes were for the 1m intervals at the

control points while the heuristic method have been programmed for the 0.1m intervals, to

compare the result of the heuristic method with the results of manual AutoCAD based

method, the areas estimations of the heuristic method were made another time by changing

the heights of control points in 1 m intervals.

[Figure 7]

5. Validation of the Suggested Methods

The T-Test were used for pairwise comparing of the heuristic method with the manually

practiced method and also one way ANOVA test was applied to compare the results of the

three alternative proposed methods (MLR, ANN and the heuristic) with each other.

Results

Results of three alternative applied earthwork estimation methods and their comparisons

against the manual approach (AutoCAD) are presented as follows:

MLR Models

Results of MLR modeling of cut and fill areas are shown in the equations (1) and (2) given

respectively.

[Equation 1]

[Equation 2]

11
The figures 8 and 9 illustrated the plots of MLR estimations against the values calculated in

AutoCAD environment.

[Figure 8]

[Figure 9]

ANN

In this study a back propagation network with 2 hidden layers and 10 neurons were used to

train, test and validate the network. It had the best results of network with R= 0.99 and

RMSE= 3.07. The cut/fill points and predicted model line were very closely overlaid (Figure

10). The figures 11 and 12 illustrated the plots of ANN estimations against the values

calculated in AutoCAD environment.

[Figure 10]

[Figure 11]

[Figure 12]

Heuristic

Figure 13 illustrates an example for the heuristic model simulation against alternative offsets

(in a case cross section with 1 m intervals). A heuristic model to calculate cut/fill areas was

developed and introduced as a new technique in this research. The road location with 0.1m

intervals within 4.8m above and below height of ground was defined based on the Iranian

road design standards. To compare the results of the heuristic and the common AutoCAD

method intervals changed from 0.1 to 1 m (figure 13).

[Figure 13]

12
The figures 14 and 15 illustrated the plots of heuristic estimations against the values

calculated in AutoCAD environment.

[Figure 14]

[Figure 15]

The abilities of the heuristic model were tested by comparison with the result of AutoCAD

calculation for each cross section form (table 1). As it shown in the table 1, estimations of the

heuristic model were not significantly different from the AutoCAD results. The P-values 0.47

and 0.28 obtained for cut and fill areas respectively, indicated that the heuristic model

showed a reliable performance for cut/fill area estimations.

[Table 1]

According to the P-values (0.97 and 0.98) in one-way ANOVA with confidence level of 0.95,

there were no significant differences between the suggested methods of area calculation

(table 2).

[Table 2]

Discussion

Similar to the result of this study, Aruga et al (2005) considered ground slope effects on

earthwork volume in 1m intervals. In practice, the control points’ positions often change less

that 1 meter in road profile planning. Therefore, logically, a reliable framework should be

able to calculate the cut/fill areas for smaller changes of cross section elevation intervals that

13
were 0.1 m in the present study. The run time of each method was not of any significant value

and is thus not reported.

The road location with 0.1m intervals within 4.8m above and below height of ground is

defined based on the Iranian road design standards as it shown in figure 5. In the work by

Aruga et al (2005), excavation in rock was at a ratio of 1: 0.3. If a cut slope or a fill slope

exceeds 5 m in height, it was assumed that blocks are used to fix a slope at 1: 0.3 ratios.

Although it will increase the precision of the design, but it is not a common practice in Iran

and thus, this study had to ignore it.

As noted earlier three practical earthwork area models, which can work with real slope

databases, were developed in this study. Some tests were used to examine the relative effects

of various models and the usability considerations. The results of table.2 demonstrated The

correlation (p<0.01) of three proposed methods compared to the common practice method

and verified that not only all of them can determine the cut/fill area as well as the AutoCAD

method but also they can do it in a short run time.

This study employed trapezoidal method to calculate the occupied area because of its high

precision, as it was used by Jha and Schonfeld (2004).

The heuristic method is based on the mathematical formulation, so inclusion of all influential

factors in the model is possible and it will result in more accurate estimation. This study used

trapezoidal method to calculate the occupied area. Dividing the occupied area to the small

trapezoidal and computing their areas, led us to a more precise results. In this study the

occupied area was divided in 50 trapezoidal.

As it shown in figure.3, in this study, when applying MLR, negative offsets of ground height

were ignored for fill areas and the positive ones for cut areas because of the fact that their

14
values are tending to zero. But in steeped ground slopes, it may change. Although it is not

considerable in one cross-section, it can be influential along the whole road path.

According to Seibi and Al-Alawi (1997), determining the number of hidden layers to use and

the proper number of neurons to include in each hidden layer, are of crucial importance in

designing neural network structures. However, many related researches indicated that one or

two hidden layers with an adequate number of neurons are enough to model many of the

problems. For example, Tiryaki (2008) states that properly trained back propagation networks

tend to give reasonable answers when presented with inputs that they have never seen. It is

also noted that, although both presented ANN and MLR can determine the area of cut/fill,

they need to be tuned to adapt to new road standards or to include any other influential

factors resulted from new road condition. According to the equation 1 and 2 and figure 10, R2

is 0.93and 0.94 for the MLR models while it is 0.99 for the ANN result. As same as Peyro et

al (2014), it can be concluded that the ANN is more power full than MLR in determining the

cut/fill areas. Existing nonlinear relation between factors can be the reason.

The heuristic method, however, does not have limitations of the ANN and MLR and is faster

than the other ones and can be easily adapted to new condition. Hence, it seems to be the best

method in calculating cut/fill areas and consequently the earthwork volumes. The method

seems promising to be applied to other more detailed alignment optimization problems. One

of the characteristics of the proposed heuristic method is its capability of changing simply

and quickly to adapt to a new pattern of road structure with small modifications.

In conclusion this study examined replacing three different methods of calculating area in

different offsets of forest road cross sections with the common AutoCAD method, following

results can be drawn from the present study:

15
 - All of three proposed methods determined the cut/fill areas as well as the AutoCAD

method in a short run time.

- Although the ANN and MLR determinations were as well as AutoCAD results, they

were not able to swift change parallel of road structure modifying without any extra

educating.

- Except of exact determination of areas, the proposed heuristic method had a capability

that by adding an extra factor, removing or changing some existence parameters of

road structures like the slope, road width or any other ones, it just needs a little change

in model entrances without any extra needed of retraining.

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19
Equation (1):

= −24.975 − 16.852 + 13.546 + 9.944 − 48.936 + 2.277 −

3.078 + 41.843 − 2.168 + 0.19 R2 = 0.94

Equation (2):

= −19.361 + 17.748 + 47.458 + 3.201 − 0.222 − 1.768 +

7.311 − 0.375 + 0.125 R2 = 0.93

Whereas:

= alternative height at control points within 4.8 m above and below ground height

, , , , = the slope of every break lines of up slope

, , , , = the slope of every break lines of down slope

, , , , = the height of every break lines of down slope

, , , , = the height of every break lines of up slope

20
Figure legends:

Figure 1. The effect of ground profile on cut area in two different natural ground slopes

Figure 2. location of the study area

Figure 3. An example for cut/fill areas in an assumed road cross section in AutoCAD map

environment. The cut/fill areas vary by changing the vertical distance of road surface rather

than natural ground

Figure 4. Schematic representation of possible number of forest road cross sections that are

formed by changing the vertical position of road surface. Cut/fill areas in different positive

and negative height intervals of ground

Figure 5. An example of natural ground cross section (upslope and down slope parts with

their angles ( ) length (Yi) and width (Xi)

Figure 6. Geometrical standards of road cross section in Iran

Figure 7. An example of cut/fill area division in trapezoidal method

Figure 8. MLR’s cut area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

Figure 9. MLR’s fill area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

Figure 10. The distribution of cut areas and estimated line using neural network method for

test and training data

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Figure 11. ANN’s cut area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

Figure 12. ANN’s fill area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

Figure 13. Forest road cross section simulated by the heuristic model

Figure 14. Heuristic’s cut area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

Figure 15. Heuristic’s fill area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

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Figure 1: The effect of ground profile on cut area in two different natural ground slopes

Figure 2: location of the study area

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Figure 3: An example for cut/fill areas in an assumed road cross section in AutoCAD map

environment. The cut/fill areas vary by changing the vertical distance of road surface rather

than natural ground

Figure 4: Schematic representation of possible number of forest road cross sections that are

formed by changing the vertical position of road surface. Cut/fill areas in different positive

and negative height intervals of ground

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Figure 5: An example of natural ground cross section (upslope and down slope parts with

their angles ( ) length (Yi) and width (Xi)

Figure 6: Geometrical standards of road cross section in Iran

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Figure 7: An example of cut/fill area division in trapezoidal method

Figure 8: MLR’s cut area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

Figure 9: MLR’s fill area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

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Figure 10: The distribution of cut areas and estimated line using neural network method for

test and training data

Figure 11: ANN’s cut area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

Figure 12: ANN’s fill area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

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Figure 13: Forest road cross section simulated by the heuristic model

Figure 14: Heuristic’s cut area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

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Figure 15: Heuristic’s fill area estimations against the AutoCAD calculations

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Table 1. Pairwise T-Test results of heuristic and common method (AutoCAD) for calculation

of cut/fill areas

Mean Standard deviation P-value df t

Cut 32.7 5.6 0.47 1499 0.72

Fill 26.2 3.06 0.28 1499 1.07

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Table 2. ANOVA results of comparing two applied and AutoCAD method for cut/fill areas

Sum of squares df Mean square F P-value

Cut / between group 666.47 3 222.16 0.08 0.97

Fill / between group 220.26 3 73.42 0.06 0.98

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