Forecasting the Mechanical Properties of Plastic Concrete Employing Experimental Data Using Machine Learning Algorithms: DT, MLPNN, SVM, and RF

Afnan Nafees; Sherbaz Khan; Muhammad Faisal Javed; Raid Alrowais; Abdeliazim Mustafa Mohamed; Abdullah Mohamed; Nikolai Ivanovic Vatin

doi:10.3390/polym14081583

Forecasting the Mechanical Properties of Plastic Concrete Employing Experimental Data Using Machine Learning Algorithms: DT, MLPNN, SVM, and RF

Polymers (Basel). 2022 Apr 13;14(8):1583. doi: 10.3390/polym14081583.

Authors

Afnan Nafees¹, Sherbaz Khan², Muhammad Faisal Javed¹, Raid Alrowais³, Abdeliazim Mustafa Mohamed^{4

5}, Abdullah Mohamed⁶, Nikolai Ivanovic Vatin⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Civil Engineering, COMSATS University Islamabad, Abbottabad Campus, Abbottabad 22060, Pakistan.
² NUST Institute of Civil Engineering NICE, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering SCEE, National University of Sciences and Technology NUST, Sector H-12, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan.
³ Department of Civil Engineering, Jouf University, Sakaka 72388, Saudi Arabia.
⁴ Department of Civil Engineering, College of Engineering, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Alkharj 16273, Saudi Arabia.
⁵ Building & Construction Technology Department, Bayan College of Science and Technology, Khartoum 210, Sudan.
⁶ Research Centre, Future University in Egypt, New Cairo 11835, Egypt.
⁷ Institute of Civil Engineering, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, 195291 St. Petersburg, Russia.

Abstract

Increased population necessitates an expansion of infrastructure and urbanization, resulting in growth in the construction industry. A rise in population also results in an increased plastic waste, globally. Recycling plastic waste is a global concern. Utilization of plastic waste in concrete can be an optimal solution from recycling perspective in construction industry. As environmental issues continue to grow, the development of predictive machine learning models is critical. Thus, this study aims to create modelling tools for estimating the compressive and tensile strengths of plastic concrete. For predicting the strength of concrete produced with plastic waste, this research integrates machine learning algorithms (individual and ensemble techniques), including bagging and adaptive boosting by including weak learners. For predicting the mechanical properties, 80 cylinders for compressive strength and 80 cylinders for split tensile strength were casted and tested with varying percentages of irradiated plastic waste, either as of cement or fine aggregate replacement. In addition, a thorough and reliable database, including 320 compressive strength tests and 320 split tensile strength tests, was generated from existing literature. Individual, bagging and adaptive boosting models of decision tree, multilayer perceptron neural network, and support vector machines were developed and compared with modified learner model of random forest. The results implied that individual model response was enriched by utilizing bagging and boosting learners. A random forest with a modified learner algorithm provided the robust performance of the models with coefficient correlation of 0.932 for compressive strength and 0.86 for split tensile strength with the least errors. Sensitivity analyses showed that tensile strength models were least sensitive to water and coarse aggregates, while cement, silica fume, coarse aggregate, and age have a substantial effect on compressive strength models. To minimize overfitting errors and corroborate the generalized modelling result, a cross-validation K-Fold technique was used. Machine learning algorithms are used to predict mechanical properties of plastic concrete to promote sustainability in construction industry.

Keywords: bagging; boosting; correlation coefficient; cross-validation; ensemble techniques; irradiated plastic waste; machine learning; plastic concrete; predictive modeling; sensitivity analysis.