Friday's Transportation Seminar is all about smart infrastructure. James Tsai from Georgia Tech presents, "A sensor-based and spatially-enabled system for next generation Intelligent and sustainable infrastructure management."
Roadway infrastructures, including pavements, bridges, and signs are deteriorating rapidly due to material aging, improper usage, harsh environments, and damages resulting from natural or man-made hazards. With the advancement of sensor technologies, it become feasible to collect the large-scale in-field detailed infrastructure data, such as 3D pavement surface data, using high-performance cameras, lasers, LiDARs, and Inertial Navigation System (INS) to gain better insight understanding of the large-scale in-filed infrastructure behavior. This talk first presents a framework for the sensor-based and spatially-enabled next generation Intelligent and sustainable infrastructure management system, including the key components of data acquisition, automatic information extraction, data integration, and intelligent infrastructure management. An intelligent sensing system has been developed, using 2D Imaging, Laser, LiDAR, and GPS/GIS Technologies with artificial intelligent and pattern recognition to automatically detect pavement surface distress, including rutting, cracking, raveling, etc. along with their detailed level characteristics for determining pavement health condition. The availability of high-resolution roadway images, 3D pavement surface data, and 3D LiDAR data has brought us a great opportunity and new challenges. This calls for a new concept to model this detailed level of big data for revealing new values for infrastructure management. First, we need to effectively extract valuable decision-support from this big data. For cracking, an innovative crack fundamental element (CFE) model that is a topological representation of cracks to support crack classification, diagnosis, and intelligent pavement management will be presented; this CFE provides researchers a mathematical foundation for modeling large-scale, in-field pavement/infrastructure crack characteristics to study crack propagation behavior at multiple scales will be presented. Examples of developing an innovative and sustainable pavement preservation method and developing intelligent crack sealing planning using emerging sensor technologies will also be presented.
The Friday Transportation Seminar takes place on September 12, 2014 from 4:00-5:00 PM in 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building. Cookie Hour immediately precedes it at 3:30 PM in the same location. (Note: Cookie Hour is not in the library!) There will be a no-host Happy Hour at LaVal's at 5:00 PM.