Framework and implementation of a continuous network-wide health monitoring system for roadways

Abstract

According to the 2013 ASCE report card America's infrastructure scores only a D+. There are more than four million miles of roads (grade D) in the U.S. requiring a broad range of maintenance activities. The nation faces a monumental problem of infrastructure management in the scheduling and implementation of maintenance and repair operations, and in the prioritization of expenditures within budgetary constraints. The efficient and effective performance of these operations however is crucial to ensuring roadway safety, preventing catastrophic failures, and promoting economic growth. There is a critical need for technology that can cost-effectively monitor the condition of a network-wide road system and provide accurate, up-to-date information for maintenance activity prioritization.The Versatile Onboard Traffic Embedded Roaming Sensors (VOTERS) project provides a framework and the sensing capability to complement periodical localized inspections to continuous network-wide health monitoring. Research focused on the development of a cost-effective, lightweight package of multi-modal sensor systems compatible with this framework. An innovative software infrastructure is created that collects, processes, and evaluates these large time-lapse multi-modal data streams. A GIS-based control center manages multiple inspection vehicles and the data for further analysis, visualization, and decision making. VOTERS' technology can monitor road conditions at both the surface and sub-surface levels while the vehicle is navigating through daily traffic going about its normal business, thereby allowing for network-wide frequent assessment of roadways. This deterioration process monitoring at unprecedented time and spatial scales provides unique experimental data that can be used to improve life-cycle cost analysis models.

Quantifying the sensing power of vehicle fleets

“…High-resolution air-quality readings can help combat pollution, while measurements of air temperature and humidity can help improve the calibration of meteorological models (24, 25) and are useful in the detection of gas leaks (26). Degraded road segments can be identified with accelerometer data, helping inform preventive repair (27, 28), while pedestrian-density data can be helpful in the modeling of crowd dynamics (29). Finally, information on parking-spot occupancy, Wi-Fi access points, and street-light infrastructure—all obtainable with modern sensors—will enable advanced city analytics as well as facilitate the development of new big-data and internet-of-things services and applications.…”

Big Five Technologies in Aeronautical Engineering Education: Scoping Review

“…The most cited paper related to the digital technology of Big Data appeared in 2014, and is related to a framework complementing periodical localized inspections to continuous network-wide health monitoring (Wang, Birken, & Shahini Shamsabadi, 2014). There are seven papers including specific references to digital technology (Table 5).…”

Spatio-Temporal Coverage Enhancement in Drive-By Sensing Through Utility-Aware Mobile Agent Selection

“…Google street view [2] is a famous example of the drive-by sensing paradigm, wherein vehicles are employed to collect street-level imagery on a global scale. Drive-by sensing paradigm has also been employed to monitor the road conditions at both the surface and sub-surface levels [3].…”