Research on a real-time monitoring platform for compaction of high embankment in airport engineering

Quality control of embankment compaction is of great significance to the durability and stability of high-embankment airports. The current method of embankment quality control mainly relies on manual inspection for a limited number of designated locations after the completion of compaction, which cannot provide the information feedback simultaneously during the compaction or guarantee the compaction quality of the entire working surface. There is an urgent need to develop a new quality-control method of high-embankment airports for the full course of the compaction process. In this paper, a management platform is developed to monitor the real-time compaction process of a high-embankment airport and evaluate the compaction quality of the working surface. To mitigate the effect of human factors to a minimal extent, an optimal path algorithm to guide the real-time compaction trajectory of the impact compactor is proposed, and the unmanned vehicle control technology is implemented on the impact compactor. Furthermore, a virtual-reality tool is incorporated in the developed management platform to provide a three-dimensional interactive display for the compaction process. The feasibility and robustness of the developed management platform is validated by a case study in a pilot section of Beijing Daxing International Airport. The data collected in the case study show that the proposed optimal path algorithm and unmanned vehicle control technique enable the construction process to be faster and more efficient and improve the compaction quality of embankment.