journal article·2025-12-03Open access

Construction of an Intelligent Risk Identification System for Highway Flood Damage Based on Multimodal Large Models

Jinzi Zheng, Zhiyang Liu, Chenguang Li, Hanchu Zhou, Erlong Lou, Yaqi Li, Bingou Xu

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 23

Abstract

Under the increasing threat of extreme weather events, road infrastructure faces significant risks of flood-induced damage. Traditional manual inspection methods are insufficient for modern highway emergency response, which requires higher efficiency and accuracy. To enhance the precision and accuracy of flood damage identification, this study proposes an intelligent recognition system that integrates a multimodal large language model with a structured knowledge base. The system constructs a professional repository covering eight typical categories of flood damage, including roadbed, pavement, and bridge components, with associated attributes, visual features, and mitigation strategies. A vectorized indexing mechanism enables fine-grained semantic retrieval, while task-specific templates and prompt engineering guide the multimodal model, such as Qwen-VL-Max, which extracts risk elements from image–text inputs and generating structured identification results with expert recommendations. The system is evaluated on a real-world highway flood damage dataset. The results show that the knowledge-enhanced model performs better than the baseline and prompt-optimized models. It reaches 91.5% average accuracy, a semantic relevance score of 4.58 out of 5, and 85% robustness under difficult conditions. These results highlight the strong domain adaptability and practical value for real-time flood damage assessment and emergency response.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Flood Risk Assessment and Management · Infrastructure Maintenance and Monitoring · Public Relations and Crisis Communication

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Highway Traffic Management, Research Institute for Road Safety of MPS, Beijing 100024, China

School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China

College of Metropolitan Transportation, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China

Funding

Ministry of Public Security Science and Technology Plan Project · Special Project of the National Key R&D Program: “Integrated Application of Real-Time Automatic Release of Early Warning Information and Vehicle Warning & Interception” · Ministry of Education Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences · Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, China

References (27)

Show source-provided references
1. Regional risk evaluation of flood disasters for the trunk-highway in Shaanxi, China10.3390/ijerph121113861 ↗
2. River flood risk assessment for the Chinese road network10.1016/j.trd.2023.103818 ↗
3. Glago, F.J. (2021). Flood Disaster Hazards; Causes, Impacts and Management: A State-of-the-Art Review. Natural Hazards-Impacts, Adjustments and Resilience, IntechOpen.10.5772/intechopen.95048 ↗
4. Large language models (LLMs): Survey, technical frameworks, and future challenges10.1007/s10462-024-10888-y ↗
5. Ahmed, A., Farhan, M., Eesaar, H., Chong, K.T., and Tayara, H. (2024). From detection to action: A multimodal AI framework for traffic incident response. Drones, 8.10.3390/drones8120741 ↗
6. Using multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for automated detection of traffic safety-critical events10.3390/vehicles6030074 ↗
7. Vision technologies with applications in traffic surveillance systems: A holistic survey
8. Karim, M.M., Shi, Y., Zhang, S., Wang, B., Nasri, M., and Wang, Y. (2025). Large Language Models and Their Applications in Roadway Safety and Mobility Enhancement: A Comprehensive Review. arXiv.10.1016/j.ait.2025.100004 ↗
9. A survey on hallucination in large language models: Principles, taxonomy, challenges, and open questions10.1145/3703155 ↗
10. Large Language Models in transportation: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis of emerging trends, challenges and future research10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3589319 ↗
11. Sbvqa 2.0: Robust end-to-end speech-based visual question answering for open-ended questions10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3339537 ↗
12. Evolution and Prospects of Foundation Models: From Large Language Models to Large Multimodal Models
13. Huynh, N.D., Bouadjenek, M.R., Razzak, I., Hacid, H., and Aryal, S. (2025). SVLA: A Unified Speech-Vision-Language Assistant with Multimodal Reasoning and Speech Generation. arXiv.
14. Ruan, S., Dong, Y., Liu, H., Huang, Y., Su, H., and Wei, X. (October, January 29). Omniview-Tuning: Boosting Viewpoint Invariance of Vision-Language Pre-Training Models. Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2024, Milan, Italy.10.1007/978-3-031-73347-5_18 ↗
15. Modality-experts coordinated adaptation for large multimodal models10.1007/s11432-024-4234-4 ↗
16. Huang, D., Yan, C., Li, Q., and Peng, X. (2024). From large language models to large multimodal models: A literature review. Appl. Sci., 14.10.3390/app14125068 ↗
17. Chaubey, H.K., Tripathi, G., and Ranjan, R. (2024, January 7–8). Comparative analysis of RAG, fine-tuning, and prompt engineering in chatbot development. Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Future Technologies for Smart Society (ICFTSS), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.10.1109/ICFTSS61109.2024.10691338 ↗
18. Marvin, G., Hellen, N., Jjingo, D., and Nakatumba-Nabende, J. (2023, January 27–28). Prompt Engineering in Large Language Models. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Data Intelligence and Cognitive Informatics (ICDICI 2023), Tirunelveli, India.
19. Unleashing the potential of prompt engineering for large language models10.1016/j.patter.2025.101260 ↗
20. Cheng, H., Zhang, R., Zhang, R., Li, Y., Lei, Y., and Zhang, W. (2025). Intelligent Detection and Description of Foreign Object Debris on Airport Pavements via Enhanced YOLOv7 and GPT-Based Prompt Engineering. Sensors, 25.10.3390/s25165116 ↗
21. Sahoo, P., Singh, A.K., Saha, S., Jain, V., Mondal, S., and Chadha, A. (2024). A systematic survey of prompt engineering in large language models: Techniques and applications. arXiv.10.1007/979-8-8688-0569-1_4 ↗
22. Yu, H., Gan, A., Zhang, K., Tong, S., Liu, Q., and Liu, Z. (2024, January 9–11). Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey. Proceedings of the 12th CCF Conference, BigData 2024, Qingdao, China.
23. Jung, T., and Joe, I. (2025). An Intelligent Docent System with a Small Large Language Model (sLLM) Based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Appl. Sci., 15.10.3390/app15179398 ↗
24. Tyndall, E., Wagner, T., Gayheart, C., Some, A., and Langhals, B. (2025). Feasibility Evaluation of Secure Offline Large Language Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation for CPU-Only Inference. Information, 16.10.3390/info16090744 ↗
25. Multimodal artificial intelligence approaches using large language models for expert-level landslide image analysis10.1111/mice.13482 ↗
26. Kadiyala, L.A., Mermer, O., Samuel, D.J., Sermet, Y., and Demir, I. (2024). The implementation of multimodal large language models for hydrological applications: A comparative study of GPT-4 vision, gemini, LLaVa, and multimodal-GPT. Hydrology, 11.10.3390/hydrology11090148 ↗
27. Multimodal knowledge graph construction for risk identification in water diversion projects10.1016/j.jhydrol.2024.131155 ↗