Link to Latest Report: March 2025 Progress Report
Background:
A paradigm shift in thinking and decision making is needed for deciding on setting priorities for repair, upgrading or replacement of existing bridges. Advanced human-centric and data-driven decision-making tools should be developed to provide an opportunity for all stakeholders to actively participate in decision making processes. The state of knowledge in the field of research and any other critical information: This project will pave the ground towards such a decision-making tool by collecting the necessary data, creating the knowledge based on this data, and assessing the needs to develop the tool. The novelty of this research is that, for the first time in the transportation management field, the needs and data requirements to create such a decision-making tool will be identified with importance given to ensure sustainability and resilience of populations. Following a thorough study and general assessment of the population characteristics, environmental issues, transportation network and infrastructure, the data requirements of the tool based on infrastructure system profiles, availability, allocation, and optimal assignment of critical resources will be described. Although the state and federal Departments of Transportation possess some data sets, this project will go beyond them and include qualitative and quantitative data to create the knowledge base. This knowledge base can be tailored to identify the specific needs of bridge technologies during blue sky days as well as during a disaster focusing on the following critical outcomes: safety, accessibility, speed, reliability and fulfillment. This will be conducted using a rural-focused case study application to the State of Florida.
Objective:
The objectives of this research include:
- Create a secure, unified, integrated, and accessible geospatial knowledge base that includes heterogeneous data on demographics, traffic, environment, and infrastructure, which will be available for prioritizing, implementing and validating bridge technologies.
- Develop a cloud-based platform to provide access to these infrastructure, population, environment, mobility and related geographic information systems (GIS) datasets in the State of Florida.
- Conduct a needs assessment using data-driven approaches towards prioritizing bridge technologies.
- Identify the data requirements for the development of the proposed decision-making tool.
Scope:
The proposed project includes several tasks
- Task 1 – Knowledge Acquisition:
- Since knowledge and experience exists in disparate sources (several places and with a number of people in addition to the published literature), a large domain of knowledge between literature and the human experts should be surveyed. This step involves meeting with experts (that will be identified through the center as the personnel highly experienced in bridge projects) to acquire and process expert knowledge, existing practice, and review documents and other resources to clarify the diversity of available knowledge. Following these efforts, a meta-analysis and an extensive review of existing knowledge will be conducted including the following sources: previous studies, generic tools, planning models, and relevant published data.
- Task 2 – Knowledge Elucidation:
- This step involves processing the expert knowledge and literature reviewed in the prior step in order to add value to the knowledge acquired. We will compile the demographics, traffic, environment, and infrastructure data as well as prior experiences of practitioners. These data will be analyzed thoroughly to extract relevant information that can be used for prioritizing bridge projects, especially with a specific focus on rural areas.
- Task 3 – Knowledge Representation
- This task will be completed through the development of material including tables, flowcharts, visual illustrations and guidelines using the knowledge obtained and processed in the previous stages. Based on the data collected, hypothetical scenarios will be created with the goal of assessing the performance of the transportation network and bridges in serving the communities they are located in. This information will be presented in GIS-based maps/compatible database formats so that officials can access these attributes to evaluate the facility for bridge projects.
- Task 4 – Validation and Verification
- Most of the information reviewed will be highly technical and procedural, and therefore it is important to verify and validate this information very carefully before actually using it. Upon carrying out different steps of the framework, they will be evaluated by the experts and the PIs to ensure their accuracy and appropriateness for bridge projects. Depending upon the results of this step, the PIs will decide whether or not to go back to the previous steps, and to make adjustments.
Research Team:
Principal Investigator: Eren Erman Ozguven, Ph.D.
Co-Principal Investigator: John Sobanjo, Ph.D., Qianwen Guo, Ph.D., and Neetesh Sharma, Ph.D.
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