A heuristic model for determining cut and fills areas for road designing in different offsets of ground cross section

Earthwork operation is a complicated part in forest road construction that accounts for ca. 25% of the associated costs. Thus, accurate forest road profile planning is an important factor of determining earthwork volume. Planning a profile design with the aim of minimizing earthwork volumes entails a computer program that is capable to calculate earthwork area in different intervals of every cross section. The aim of this study was to incorporate ground shape at cross sections as a first step of determining an optimal vertical alignment of forest roads. First, AutoCAD was used to calculate the exact extensions of cut and fill areas in 1m intervals at every 275 cross sections as a witness sample. Then cross sections with different slopes were investigated by means of MATLAB heuristic programming. The accuracy of results was validated by AutoCAD. Paired sample T-Test was used for comparing the results of the suggested method against the commonly used method. The results revealed a good performance of the suggested method, which not only reduced computational burden but also keep the design's rectitude constantly by R2=0.99. The flexibility of the MATLAB heuristic programming makes it a powerful tool in rapid redesigning of new road standards.