Abstract
There is an increasing recognition of the importance of incorporating social equity into transportation infrastructure system decision-making. This paper presents a semantic, ontology-based system for stakeholder-conscious infrastructure project planning and design. The ontology offers a semantic model for representing and reasoning about the stakeholders of transportation projects, the benefits generated by transportation projects, and the analysis of the social equity of transportation projects based on stakeholder input and expected benefits. The theoretical foundation of the proposed equity analysis is grounded in the area of social welfare theory. The ontology was verified and validated using automated consistency checking, automated redundancy checking, expert evaluation, and real-life case study evaluation. The proposed ontology-based system may support infrastructure system decision-making by assessing the social (group) welfare based on the economic, social, and environmental benefits of transportation project alternatives and taking stakeholder preferences into account, and may lead to better identification of the alternative(s) that offer the highest social welfare.
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Acknowledgments
The writers would like to thank the National Science Foundation (NSF). This paper is based upon work supported by NSF under Grant No. 1254679. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 141 • Issue 2 • February 2015
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 21, 2013
Accepted: Mar 13, 2014
Published online: Sep 24, 2014
Published in print: Feb 1, 2015
Discussion open until: Feb 24, 2015
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