PRELIMINARY RESEARCHES REGARDING THE USE OF ANN TO PREDICT THE WHEEL-SOIL INTERACTION

Soil-wheel interactions as a phenomenon in which both components are behaving nonlinearly has been considered a sophisticated and complex relation to be modeled. A well-trained artificial neural networks as a useful tool is widely used in variety of science and engineering fields. We inspired to use this facility for application of some soil-wheel interaction products since nonlinear and complex relationships between wheel and soil necessitate more precise and reliable calculations. A 2-14-2 feed forward neural network with back propagation algorithm was found to have acceptable performance with mean squared error of 0.020. This model was used to predict two output variables of rut depth and contact area with regression correlations of 0.99961 and 0.99996 for rut depth and contact area, respectively. Furthermore, the results were compared with conventional models proposed for predicting the contact area and rut depth. The promising results of ANN model give higher privilege over conventional models. The findings also introduce the potential of ANN for modeling. However, the authors recommend further studies to be conducted in this realm of computing due to its great potential and capability.