Week 1: Getting Started

Hi everyone! This week, I made a lot of progress on research. 

First, I wanted to see how bridge inspections/maintenance work currently in the United States. I looked at the Federal Highway Administration Bridge Preservation Guide and the American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Report Card, and the statistics were surprising.

According to the ASCE Report Card, U.S. bridges were given a C grade. 42% of U.S. bridges are at least 50 years old, and an estimated $125 billion national backlog for rehabilitation remains. After looking at the rate of investment for bridge repairs, I realized that meant that it will take approximately 50 years just to fix all of the repairs that need to be made today. That is not a small problem: it’s a systematic one.

The Bridge Preservation Guide by the FHWA was perhaps the most beneficial thing I read this week. This guide will take you through the lifecycle of a bridge from a maintenance perspective: determining at what point an agency determines that they need to intervene, what kinds of treatments are available, and how to analyze the cost of taking action early versus waiting too long. I learned that bridge maintenance can be classified into two basic types: preventive maintenance and reactive maintenance. Preventive maintenance is proactive, focusing on applying treatments to bridges in good condition before they have serious deterioration. It is similar to changing your oil on schedule prior to an engine failure rather than after. Reactive maintenance only occurs after damage has occurred to the structure, making it a much more expensive and risky option for the agency. What I took away from the guide is that the system knows what good maintenance practices are supposed to be, but due to an overwhelming number of bridges and limited financial resources available to agencies, it is almost impossible for agencies to consistently stay ahead of the curve in bridge maintenance.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the next couple of weeks will bring. I’m hoping to go on-site and witness the actual bridge maintenance and inspections of the bridge structures first-hand. With respect to research, I will be looking into how to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into existing bridge inspection systems, as well as predictive modeling that already exists in this space, and how those models compare to real bridge condition data. Ultimately, I hope that this work results in my own established framework that can connect the traditional methods of maintaining bridges with the possibilities offered by the modern data analytics landscape.

Below, I attached my Senior Project Proposal for you guys to look at if you are interested.

Updated Philip_Senior Project Full Proposal

Work Cited: 

American Society of Civil Engineers. 2021 Infrastructure Report Card: Bridges. ASCE, 2021, www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges-infrastructure/.

Federal Highway Administration. Bridge Preservation Guide: Maintaining a State of Good Repair Using Cost Effective Investment Strategies. U.S. Department of Transportation, FHWA, www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/preservation/guide/guide.pdf.