The goal of the project is to build robust big data pipelines for representative bridges that serve as reference implementations of rural transportation and rail networks. Data collected from existing or new datasets related to the representative bridges will facilitate data-enabled or data-facilitated inquiry along with the four focus areas of SMARTI. Specific research questions have guided our activities in four focus areas and related workgroups.
Focus Area 1: Next-Gen Health Monitoring
- Research Question NG 1: Can durable, low-cost systems involving non-contact and contact sensors that integrate Big Data pipelines become essential components for maintaining rural bridge health?
- Research Question NG 2: What is a suitable technique to autonomously maneuver a UAV so that it can collect data from the surface of a 3D bridge structure while ensuring certain constraints are satisfied?
- Research Question NG 3: Can on-site fusion techniques be applied to produce and discover new bridge datasets and restore missing data without installing additional sensors?
Focus Area 2: Data Management
- Research Question DM 1: How to perform automatic curation of bridge health data and what formats would increase data security and portability for long-term preservation?
- Research Question DM 2: How can bridge health data be expressed through metadata to encourage discovery and reuse for social science, computational, and engineering research?
- Research Question DS 3. What data visualization techniques and tools provide an optimal user experience to extract actions to address bridge health through exploration and interaction?
Focus Area 3: Decision Support Systems
- Research Question DS 1: How to predict responses from several locations on the bridge using sparse instrumentation schemes coupled with accurate computational models for damage indices when exact loads (inputs) are unknown?
- Research Question DS 2: What machine/deep learning techniques help identify factors or factor level combinations that indicate deterioration of bridge health in the representative set of bridges?
Focus Area 4: Socio-Technical Impact
- Research question ST 1. What are the institutional challenges in the transition to a focus from just building bridge infrastructure to a mindset of continuously monitoring the health of our infrastructure? How does this transition play into building resilient rural communities that can deal with disasters?
- Research question ST 2. How effective are current economic and human loss models for estimating losses from partial and cascading failures in a “systems of systems” environment?