A Review on Soil Classification Using AI and IoT in Smart Geotechnical Engineering: Approaches, Challenges, and Future Directions

Recent review studies lack a synthesized analysis of the integrated potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) which show a paradigm shift from traditional, lab-dependent soil classification methods, for geotechnical engineering. This study explores and addresses this gap by critically examining the convergence of AI and IoT for building real-time and smart soil classification systems. Besides, we present a comprehensive analysis of hybrid and explainable AI models powered by IoT-driven data, a combination poised to address conventional challenges of data inconsistency. Lastly, the future research scope is discussed to achieve autonomous and transparent geotechnical decision-making in an efficient manner.