BD Spokes: PLANNING: MIDWEST: Big Data Innovations for Bridge Health

美国各地的桥梁继续以惊人的速度恶化，美国土木工程师协会估计，改善美国功能过时或结构缺陷的桥梁需要花费超过760亿美元。这表明对创新桥梁健康监测解决方案的巨大需求，这些解决方案可以战略性地指导管理、维护和更换计划，而不会危及公共安全。不幸的是，改善我们的桥梁管理、维修或更换方式的需求与美国其他交通网络面临着类似的问题和需求：不断萎缩的资源和管理机构没有从桥梁健康数据中找到可行的解决方案的必要见解。为了讨论如何解决这些关键问题，公共和私营部门（交通基础设施和建筑环境所有者、运营商、设计师和维护者）的研究人员、从业人员和个人与大数据技术和分析专家一起参加了由内布拉斯加州大学于2015年10月主办的首届“桥梁大数据研讨会”。在这次研讨会上，大数据技术可以帮助提供及时的解决方案。同样明显的是，过去致力于利用桥梁健康监测和大数据技术作为管理和维护/更换过程的一部分的努力是分散的，由此产生的数据集不被认为是可信的，并且未得到充分利用。该项目将(1)对数据集进行分类，包括来自私营部门、学术界和政府机构的来源、版权、许可、收集程序和预期的访问控制；(2)获得利益相关者的承诺，并与小型工作组举办协作讲习班，讨论、导入/导出和共享桥梁结构健康监测数据；(3)征求企业/研究人员的建议，以开发集成不同和大量数据源的创新应用程序。预计该项目的研究结果将有利于中西部大数据中心的交通运输，并可能为高速公路、建筑、配电网络和其他民用基础设施实体的类似活动提供信息。该项目的研究结果将提交给国家和国际技术组织，直接影响劳动力发展、教育和研究项目。综合起来，这个项目将对我国有效维护桥梁健康和安全的能力产生直接影响。

Bridges across the U.S. continue to deteriorate at an alarming rate and the American Society of Civil Engineers estimate a cost of over $76 billion to improve the country's functionally obsolete or structurally deficient bridges. This indicates a significant demand for innovative bridge health monitoring solutions that can strategically guide management, maintenance and replacement programs without risking public safety. Unfortunately, the need to improve how our bridges are managed and repaired or replaced faces similar issues and demands as the rest of the U.S. transportation network: continuously shrinking resources and governing bodies who do not have the necessary insights from bridge health data to find a workable solution. To discuss how to address these critical problems, researchers, practitioners, and individuals representing public and private sectors (transportation infrastructure and built environment owners, operators, designers and maintainers) convened with Big Data technology and analytics experts participated at the inaugural BRIDGE-ing Big Data Workshop hosted by the University of Nebraska in October 2015. During this workshop, it became clear that Big Data technology could assist with providing a timely solution. It also was apparent that past efforts focusing on utilizing bridge health monitoring and big data techniques as part of the management and maintenance/replacement processes are fragmented, and resulting datasets are not deemed trustworthy and are under-utilized. This project will (1) catalog datasets including sources, copyrights, license, collection procedures, and expected access controls from private sector, academia, and government agencies, (2) obtain commitments from stakeholders and host collaboration workshops with small working groups to discuss, import/export, and share bridge structural health monitoring data, and (3) solicit proposals from businesses/researchers to develop innovative applications that integrate disparate and voluminous data sources. It is anticipated that this project's findings will benefit the Midwest Big Data Hub transportation spoke and potentially inform similar activities for highways, buildings, power distribution networks and other civil infrastructure entities. Findings from this project will be promoted to national and international technical organizations, to directly impact workforce development, education and research programs. Combined, this project will make a direct impact on our country's ability to efficiently maintain the health and safety of its bridges.