See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/317350215

New Strategies for Estimation of Cut and Fill Areas in Road Design with
Different Ground Cross-section Offsets

Article  in  Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research · June 2017

DOI: 10.1080/02827581.2017.1338748

CITATIONS READS

3 5,764

4 authors:

Razieh Babapour Ramin Naghdi

5 PUBLICATIONS   51 CITATIONS   
University of Guilan
108 PUBLICATIONS   678 CITATIONS   
SEE PROFILE
SEE PROFILE

Ismael Ghajar Reza Ghodsi

University of Guilan Central Connecticut State University
28 PUBLICATIONS   231 CITATIONS    62 PUBLICATIONS   773 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Forest road planning using a modified dijkstra's shortest path algorithm View project

Linked Data View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Razieh Babapour on 30 July 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 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

Jun 2017.
Published online: 26 Jun 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=sfor20

Download by: [37.27.88.39] Date: 28 June 2017, At: 11:07

SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF FOREST RESEARCH, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2017.1338748

New strategies for estimation of cut and fill areas in road design with different
ground cross-section offsets
Razieh Babapoura, Ramin Naghdia, Ismael Ghajara and Reza Ghodsib
a
Department of Forestry, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Guilan, Sowmeh, Iran; bEngineering Department, Central Connecticut State
University, New Britain, CT, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Earthwork operations accounted for great amount of forest road construction costs. Any Optimization Received 9 March 2016
in planning road profile needs a reliable objective function that calculates earthwork volume in an Accepted 28 May 2017
appropriate time and accuracy. This study aimed at incorporating the shape of the ground cross
KEYWORDS
sections in calculating cut/fill areas using three alternative methods including: Multiple Linear Forest road; earthwork
Regression (MLR), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and heuristic programming in MATLAB volume; artificial neural
environment. The accuracy of results was validated via AutoCAD as a manual method for area network; MATLAB; multiple
calculation of road’s cross-section. Trapezoidal method applied to calculate the area of cut/fill in linear regression; heuristic
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.

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 mountai-
nous 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, ver-
tical 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 in AutoCAD environ-
ment. 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 con-
structed in the field. When drawing road profile, each cross
section can be located on many possible heights (e.g.
between +5 to −5 m 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 dis-
tance 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 forest road profile
because it is a consuming task and a mainly a real-time calcu-
lation is needed through the optimization process.
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 align-
ment (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 and Cheng 2001) and (3) opti-
mizing 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
and Howard 1982; Trietsch 1987; Brauers et al. 2008) and ver-
tical alignments (Fwa 1989), some 3D designing models
merge these three stages in a single process, using al.
2003; Jha and 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 and Schonfeld 2004). In many other research works, opti-
mizing earthwork volume was performed via employing a
linear programming approach (Mayer and 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 digital elevation
model (DEM) of forested areas (Akay et al. 2004). Contreras

CONTACT Ramin Naghdi rnaghdi@guilan.ac.ir Department of Forestry, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Guilan, P.O. Box 1144, Sowmeh Sara, Iran
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 R. BABAPOUR ET AL.
Figure 1. The effect of ground profile on cut area in two different natural
ground slopes.
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
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 pro-
gramming 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 geographic information system using specialized
dynamic link libraries enabling dynamic communication
during the search for
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 suc-
cessfully for modeling in many fields of geological engineer-
ing 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 relation-
ship 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 and Waug
1994) with high speed (because of parallel processing), easy
to adapt in the new situations and able in solving the pro-
blems that are not capable to simulation (Kia 2010). Exception
of Peyrov et al. (2014) that applied ANN algorithm to predict
forest road, there aren’t any other application of this algor-
ithm 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 and 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 cal-
culations 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.
Materials and methods
Study site
The study was carried out in Khojedareh, a forest district cov-
ering approximately 1742 ha of Shafaroud watershed in
Guilan province – northern Iran (Figure 2). The area is
located between 48° 44′ 36′′ and 48° 49′ 58′′ of Longitude,
and 37° 37′ 23′′ and 37° 42′ 31′′ of latitude. The altitude
range of the site is between 250 and 1150 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.
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:
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 1 m intervals up to 8 m above and under
natural ground in AutoCAD map environment.
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

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 dis-
tance of road surface rather than natural ground.
of three alternative methods (MLR, ANN and heuristic)
estimation.
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 invol-
ving one or more significant independent variables to esti-
mate 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 sec-
tions 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
SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF FOREST RESEARCH 3
using linear regression dialog box in SPSS ver.19 for
windows (SPSS Inc., Chicago, USA). A separate model was pro-
duced 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.
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:
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 pre-
diction 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 were 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
4 R. BABAPOUR ET AL.
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 (a) length (Yi) and width (Xi).
network with the highest amount of R 2 and low amount of
root mean square error (RMSE) for estimating the area of
cut/fill.
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 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 proper-
ties 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 −4.8 m to
+4.8 m continuously. This concept was used for vertical align-
ment modeling of road with a discretely 0.1 m offsets. Conse-
quently, 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).
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 trapezoi-
dal 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 trape-
zoids 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.
By implementation of trapezoidal method in the heuristic
programming, the cut/fill areas were estimated in 0.1 m

Figure 6. Geometrical standards of road cross section in Iran.
Figure 7. An example of cut/fill area division in trapezoidal method.
interval between 4.8 m up and down the natural ground.
According to this point that the AutoCAD-based earthwork
volumes were for the 1 m intervals at the control points
while the heuristic method have been programmed for the
0.1 m 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.
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 heur-
istic) with each other.
Results
Results of three alternative applied earthwork estimation
methods and their comparisons against the manual approach
(AutoCAD) are presented as follows:
SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF FOREST RESEARCH 5
MLR models
Results of MLR modeling of cut and fill areas are shown in the
Equations (1) and (2) given, respectively.
cut = −24.975 − 16.852z + 13.546uy1 + 9.944uy2
− 48.936ly1 + 2.277ad1 − 3.078uy5 + 41.843ly2 (1)
− 2.168ad2 + 0.19au1 R = 0.94,
2
fill = −19.361 + 17.748z + 47.458ly1 + 3.201ly2
− 0.222au1 − 1.768ad1 + 7.311uy2 − 0.375au2 (2)
+ 0.125au3 R = 0.93,
2
whereas z is the alternative height at control points within
4.8 m above and below ground height; au1,u2,u3,u4,u5 the
slope of every break lines of up slope; ad1,d2,d3,d4,d5 the slope
of every break lines of down slope; ly1,2,3,4,5 the height of
every break lines of down slope; and uy1,2,3,4,5 the height of
every break lines of up slope.
The Figures 8 and 9 illustrated the plots of MLR estimations
against the values calculated in AutoCAD environment.
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 cal-
culated in AutoCAD environment.
Heuristic
Figure 13 illustrates an example for the heuristic model simu-
lation against alternative offsets (in a case cross section with
6 R. BABAPOUR ET AL.

300

250

200

Cut area (m2)

150
cut AutoCAD 100
cut MLR 50

0
10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10
-50

-100
Off set (m)

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

200

150

Fill area (m2)

100
fill AutoCAD
fill MLR 50

0
10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10

-50
Off set (m)

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

Figure 10. The distribution of cut area values and estimated line using artificial neural network method for the training, validation and test data.

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 0.1 m intervals within 4.8 m
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).
The Figures 14 and 15 illustrated the plots of heuristic esti-
mations against the values calculated in AutoCAD
environment.
The abilities of the heuristic model were tested by compari-
son 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
 SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF FOREST RESEARCH 7

300

250

Cut area (m2)

200

150
cut AutoCAD
cut ANN 100

50

0
10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10
Off set (m)

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

200
180
160
140

Fill area (m2)

120
100
fill AutoCAD
80
fill ANN 60
40
20
0
10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10
Off set (m)

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

10

8 Natural ground

m 0

-2

-4

-6

-8

-10 Road cross sections

-15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20
m
Figure 13. Forest road cross section simulated by the heuristic model.
8 R. BABAPOUR ET AL.

300

250

Cut area (m2)

200

150
cut AutoCAD
cut Heuristic 100

50

0
10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10
Off set (m)

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

200
180
160
140

Fill area (m2)

120
100
fill AutoCAD
80
fill Heuristic 60
40
20
0
10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10
Off set (m)

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

Table 1. Pairwise T-Test results of heuristic and common method (AutoCAD) for Table 2. ANOVA results of comparing two applied and AutoCAD method for cut/
calculation of cut/fill areas. fill areas.
Mean Standard deviation P-value df t Sum of squares df Mean square F P-value
Cut 32.7 5.6 0.47 1499 0.72 Cut / between group 666.47 3 222.16 0.08 0.97
Fill 26.2 3.06 0.28 1499 1.07 Fill / between group 220.26 3 73.42 0.06 0.98

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.
According to the P-values (0.97 and 0.98) in one-way
ANOVA with confidence level of 0.95, there were no signifi-
cant differences between the suggested methods of area cal-
culation (Table 2).
Discussion
Similar to the result of this study, Aruga et al. (2005) con-
sidered ground slope effects on earthwork volume in 1-m
intervals. In practice, the control points’ positions often
change less than 1 m 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 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 0.1 m intervals within 4.8 m 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 formu-
lation, 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 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 impor-
tance 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 pre-
sented 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 Equations 1 and 2 and Figure
10, R 2 is 0.93 and 0.94 for the MLR models while it is 0.99
for the ANN result. As same as Peyrov et al. (2014), it can be
concluded that the ANN is more power full than MLR in deter-
mining 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 conse-
quently 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:
SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF FOREST RESEARCH 9
. 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 paral-
lel of road structure modifying without any extra
educating.
. Except of exact determination of areas, the proposed heur-
istic 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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
References
Akay A, Karas IR, Sessions J, Yuksel A, Bozali N, Gundogan R. 2004. Using
high resolution digital elevation model for computer-aided forest
road design. Proceedings for XXth International Society for
Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Congress; July;
Istanbul, Turkey.
Aron IA. 1992. Optimal path / Neural network approaches to modeling of
forest road design for use in automated GIS system [Msc dissertation].
Brasov, Romania: University of Transilvania.
Aruga K, Sessions J, Akay AE. 2005. Heuristic techniques applied to forest
road profile. J For Res. 10:83–92.
Babapour R, Naghdi R, Ghajar I, Ghodsi R. 2015. Modeling the proportion
of cut slopes rock on forest roads using artificial neural network and
ordinal linear regression. Environ Monit Assess. 187(17):1–14.
Brauers WKM, Zavadskas EK, Peldschus F, Turskis Z. 2008. Multi-objective
decision-making for road design. Transport. 23:183–193.
Civco DL, Waug Y. 1994. Classification of multispectral, multitemporal,
multisource spatial data using artificial neural networks. In:
Proceedings of Annual American Society of Photogrammetry and
Remote Sensing/American Congress of Surveying and Mapping
(ASPRS/ACSM) Convention; Reno, NV. Gaithersburg (MD): ACSM; p.
123–133.
Contreras M, Aracena P, Chung W. 2012. Improving accuracy in earthwork
volume estimation for proposed forest roads using a high-resolution
digital elevation model. Croat J For Eng. 33:125–142.
Fwa TF. 1989. Highway vertical alignment analysis by dynamic program-
ming. Transport Res Rec. 1239:1–9.
Fwa TF, Chan WT, Sim YP. 2002. Optimal vertical alignment analysis for
highway design. J Transport Eng. 128:395–402.
Ghajar I, Najafi A, Ezzati S. 2010. Skidding machine allocation (SMA) using
fuzzy set theory. Croat J For Eng. 31:99–110.
Ghajar I, Najafi A, Torabi SA, Khamehchiyan M, Boston K. 2012. An adaptive
network-based fuzzy inference system for rock share estimation in
forest road construction. Croat J For Eng. 33:313–328.
Hare WL, Hossain S, Lucet Y, Rahman F. 2014. Models and strategies for
efficiently determining an optimal vertical alignment of roads.
Comput Oper Res. 44:161–173.
Hare WL, Koch VR, Lucet Y. 2011. Models and algorithms to improve earth-
work operations in road design using mixed integer linear program-
ming. Eur J Oper Res. 215:470–480.
Hasenauer H, Merkl D, Weingartner M. 2001. Estimating tree mortality of
Norway spruce stands with neural networks. Adv Environ Res. 5:405–
414.
Jensen JR, Qiu F, Ji M. 1999. Predictive modelling of coniferous forest age
using statistical and artificial neural network approaches applied to
remote sensor data. Int J Remote Sens. 20:2805–2822.
 10 R. BABAPOUR ET AL.
Jha MK, Maji A. 2007. A multi-objective genetic algorithm for optimizing
highway alignments. Computational Intelligence in Multi-criteria
Decision Making; IEEE Symposium on 2007 April 1–5; Honolulu.
Jha MK, Schonfeld P. 2000. Integrating genetic algorithms and geographic
information system to optimize highway alignments. Transport Res
Rec. 1719:233–240.
Jha MK, Schonfeld P. 2004. A highway alignment optimization model
using geographic information systems. Transport Res A. 38:455–481.
Karaman A, Caliskan E. 2009. Affective factors weight estimation in tree
felling time by artificial neural networks. Expert Syst Appl. 36:4491–
4496.
Kia M. 2010. Neural network in MATLAB. Iran: Kian Rayaneh Sabz.
Kim E, Jha MK, Son B. 2003. A stepwise highway alignment optimization
using genetic algorithms II. Transport Res Rec Pap. 39:339–360.
Lee Y, Cheng JF. 2001. Optimizing highway grades to minimize cost and
maintain traffic speed. J Transport Eng. 127:303–310.
Mayer R, Stark R. 1981. Earthmoving logistics. J Const Div. 107:297–312.
View publication stats
Meulenkamp F, Alvarez Grima M. 1999. Application of neural networks for
the prediction of the unconfined compressive strength (UCS) from
Equotip hardness. Int J Rock Mech Min Sci. 36:29–39.
Peyrov S, Najafi A, Alavi SJ. 2014. Prediction of forest roadway using arti-
ficial neural network and multiple linear regressions. J For Sustain
Develop. 1:285–296.
Seibi A, Al-Alawi SM. 1997. Prediction of fracture toughness using artificial
neural networks (ANNs). Eng Fract Mech. 56:311–319.
Shahin MA, Jaksa MB, Maier HR. 2008. State of the art of artificial neural
networks in geotechical engineering. Electron J Geotec Eng. 8:1–26.
Shaw JFB, Howard BE. 1982. Expressway route optimization by OCP.
Transport Eng J ASCE. 10:227–243.
Tiryaki B. 2008. Predicting intact rock strength for mechanical excavation
using multivariate statistics, artificial neural networks and regression
trees. Eng Geol. 99:51–60.
Trietsch D. 1987. A family of methods for preliminary highway alignment.
Transport Sci. 21:17–25.