Journal of Infrastructure Systems

Connected vehicles present an opportunity to monitor pavement condition continuously by analyzing data from vehicle-integrated position sensors and accelerometers. The current practice of characterizing and reporting ride quality is to compute the international roughness index (IRI) from elevation profile or bumpiness measurements. However, the IRI is defined only for a reference speed of $80\mathrm{km}/\mathrm{h}$. Furthermore, the relatively high cost for calibrated instruments and specialized expertise needed to produce the IRI limit its potential for widespread use in a connected vehicle environment. This research introduces the road impact factor (RIF), which is derived from vehicle integrated accelerometer data. The analysis demonstrates that RIF and IRI are directly proportional. Simultaneous data collection with a laser-based inertial profiler validates this relationship. A linear combination of the RIF from different speed bands produces a time-wavelength-intensity-transform (TWIT) that, unlike the IRI, is wavelength-unbiased. Consequently, the TWIT enables low-cost, network-wide, and repeatable performance measures at any speed. It can extend models that currently use IRI data by calibrating them with a constant of proportionality.

Highway infrastructure development typically requires major capital input. Unless planned properly, such requirements can cause serious financial constraints for investors. The push for sustainability adds a new dimension to the complexity of evaluating highway projects. Finding environmentally and socially responsible solutions for highway construction will improve its potential for acceptance by the society and in many instances the infrastructure’s life span. Even so, the prediction and determination of a project’s long-term financial viability can be a precarious exercise. Existing studies in this area have not indicated details of how to identify and deal with costs incurred in pursuing sustainability measures in highway infrastructure. This paper provides insights into the major challenges of implementing sustainability in highway project development in terms of financial concerns and obligations. It discusses the results from recent research through a literature study and a questionnaire survey of key industry stakeholders involved in highway infrastructure development. The research identified critical cost components relating to sustainability measures based on perspectives of industry stakeholders. All stakeholders believe sustainability related costs are an integral part of the decision making. However, the importance rating of these costs is relative to each stakeholder’s core business objectives. This will influence the way these cost components are dealt with during the evaluation of highway investment alternatives and financial implications. This research encourages positive thinking among the highway infrastructure practitioners about sustainability. It calls for the construction industry to maximize sustainability deliverables while ensuring financial viability over the life cycle of highway infrastructure projects.

Dams are essential infrastructures for water supply, flood control, energy production, and irrigation. A critical component for the safety of a dam is the spillway system which, by controlling releases, prevents overtopping of the dam. This in turn reduces impacts associated with excessive downstream flows and upstream water levels on infrastructures, the population, and the environment. This paper addresses reliability issues related to emergency spillways and specifically the estimation of their reliability level after prolonged periods of dormancy. During dormancy, spillway components are exposed to the environment and sustain cumulative damage that may trigger latent failures or failures on demand. Regular inspections and tests are used to detect and remediate latent failures and to assess the level of deterioration of components. The purpose of this study is to develop procedures to account for dormancy in the reliability analysis of spillways. It also demonstrates how these procedures can be used to evaluate the impact of the frequency of inspections and tests on the overall reliability of the spillways. This paper introduces measure of performance, dormant availability analysis, and dormant availability analysis via integrity assessment as methods to illustrate the unavailability or probability of failure on demand of a spillway system as a function of its dormancy period. This information can be used to determine the optimum frequency of inspection and tests taking into account the safety of the structure as well as the costs associated with inspection and testing.

This paper presents a model for leveling annual budgetary requirements (ABRs) for pavement preservation programs over a multiyear analysis period. Given the information such as the candidate pavement preservation projects, associated costs, application years, and time floats to be shifted, the presented leveling process adjusts the application years of the projects to minimize the variance among ABRs. The minimum moment method is modified considering the dummy period that is to shift preservation projects within their time floats and additional constraints for the leveling process. To validate the leveling model, this study uses Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) pavement preservation projects as a case study that consists of a total of 193 projects over a three-year analysis period between 2010 and 2012. As a result of the case study, the leveling process provides relatively consistent ABRs over the three-year analysis period for INDOT. Therefore, the major contributions of this research will assist public agencies in: (1) identifying the consistent budgetary requirements to be dedicated to the pavement preservation program, and (2) establishing a long-term budgetary goal to include all needs of the pavement preservation program at the network level.

The replacement and maintenance of subsurface assets, such as water and wastewater pipes, is of great interest to water utilities because these infrastructure networks require large amounts of investment over time. Each asset requires investment relatively rarely, but the number of assets is so enormous that the flow of money is large. Therefore the accurate estimation of the deterioration and aging process of these assets is critical to the efficient and sustainable allocation of investment spend. The development of failure models is difficult for various reasons: short spans of data (very little longitudinal data), very sparse failure rates, inaccuracy of observational data, and accuracy and availability of potential predictor data. Technical difficulties also arise such as variability and noise, censoring effects, overdispersion, and, throughout the exercise, the large volume of data usually involved. In this paper, a new regression approach is formulated that maintains a rigorous statistical approach while still being practical and easy to apply. In addition, the formulation involved permits the individual pipe history to be used in an elegantly simple Bayesian update. The example provided refers to work done for Yorkshire Water Services in estimating probability of blockage failure for all their sewerage assets.

This paper presents a methodology for developing a national database, as applied to water infrastructure systems that include both drinking water and wastewater. The database is branded as WATERiD and can be accessed through internet. Water infrastructure in the United States is aging poorly and municipal governments are struggling to find easy access to comprehensive information about achieving sustainability of their water infrastructure such as condition assessment, renewal engineering, subsurface utility engineering, best management practices, and cost of technologies. There are more than 50,000 water/wastewater utilities in the United States and no two utilities are alike. However, the lessons learned by a utility in the application of the commonly available technologies can be used as knowledge by other utilities. Because there was previously no easily accessible platform through which successful experiences and lessons learned could be shared, common mistakes including unnecessary change of orders are frequently repeated in different locations. The WATERiD database is enabling utilities to share their experiences and lessons learned, and is a single-point information center where all the relevant information about water-infrastructure sustainability can be found. To collect lessons learned and utility experience, more than 100 utilities throughout the United States and 30 additional international utilities were contacted. The data from utilities are compiled, taxonomically classified, and uploaded into WATERiD for sharing between the utilities. This paper describes a process for developing the database including database architecture, database-critical functionalities such as upload and categorization, and future development work. Sustaining and building upon the foundational WATERiD resources will continue to take the cooperation of utilities, organizations, and professionals from across the water-infrastructure industry.

Although asset management methodologies and tools related to the civil infrastructure domain have existed for decades, there are many challenges in applying these same techniques to buildings. This is because of the complexity and diversity of building structures, and their ownership profile. Numerous influences including scarcity of energy and material resources and land are creating greater awareness of the need for structured building management to reduce total life cycle needs. This reduction in consumption needs to be balanced with the requirements of the building occupant, such that building services are provided at a certain level of quality over a specified lifespan. Whether the building reaches that life and how it performs in service depends on maintenance, repair, and modernization during that timeframe, or restoration and recapitalization near the end of that timeframe. Optimal facility asset management needs to consider minimizing the life cycle costs related to these activities, while ensuring building performance levels related to condition, serviceability, safety, and capacity are met. Any decision framework should attempt to identify operational, tactical, and strategic consequences and outcomes to maximize the benefit of an investment in building facilities. The objectives of this paper are to identify the wide array of approaches to building life cycle management, review the benefits and challenges of the current state of practice, and propose a framework for achieving improved facility information for actionable facility decision support. An example case study is also provided.

Infrastructure systems are becoming increasingly complex and interdependent, for example, the growing biofuel economy in the United States that is creating new interdependencies between agriculture, biorefining, and transportation. Questions arise of the consequences of these new and expanding interdependencies on overall system performance. This paper proposes the differentiation between linear and nonlinear interdependency that, though elementary, is useful for describing the joint behavior of interdependent systems. Linear interdependency is where representative variables of systems of interest change linearly with each other, while nonlinear interdependency is where the variables change with each other but in some other manner. This paper uses Pearson’s correlation coefficient to quantify the linear interdependency between the transportation and biorefining subsystems within a larger biofuel infrastructure system based on Monte Carlo simulation results of a mathematical programming model of the system. The results are analyzed to derive relationships between linear interdependency and system performance, which in this paper is defined as the joint reliability and vulnerability of the two subsystems. The results indicate that generally, if all other factors are equal, greater linear interdependency may lead to a greater combined reliability but also a greater combined vulnerability. The results also suggest the centralization of biorefining facilities to be a key factor affecting the linear interdependency between the two subsystems such that a system with a single large biorefinery is likelier to experience both the transportation and biorefining subsystems failing at the same time, but the combined consequences of the failures are likely to be less severe than the consequences of failure of a comparable decentralized system.

Infrastructure owners or management agencies have well established quality control programs with the intent of achieving safe and effective maintenance. However, consumers are becoming more involved in economic, environmental, and social issues related to infrastructure. Therefore, a valid quality program would be more definitive by involving voice of the customer in the maintenance decision-process. In this paper, an innovative approach for achieving quality and customer satisfaction in infrastructure maintenance is proposed by implementing the quality function deployment (QFD) approach. Using bridges as an example, two separate applications of QFD have been proposed: (1) inspection prioritization, and (2) decision-making between replacement and/or rehabilitation scenarios. For both applications, an inspection house of quality is prepared for translating consumer demands (WHATs) into inspection requirements (HOWs) followed by prioritizing the inspection items (HOWs). For the inspection prioritization, hypothetical survey data is utilized. For the decision-making scenarios, a case study is furnished for a bridge located in Victoria, BC, Canada. The main conclusion as illustrated in the study is that QFD can be successfully adopted for improved management of civil infrastructure.

Historically, transportation asset management has focused more on pavements and bridges, and less on ancillary assets such as traffic signs and guardrails. This paper synthesizes the state of practice of ancillary transportation asset management to assess the needs for successful implementation of such programs by highlighting data collection strategies and costs, data analysis tools, and data use in decision making, especially as it relates to asset prioritization and quantifying the benefits of ancillary asset management. The paper focuses on 10 asset classes selected from a review of literature: culverts, earth retaining structures, guardrails, mitigation features, pavement markings, sidewalks and curbs, street lighting, traffic signals, traffic signs, and utilities and manholes. The findings indicate that a number of agencies are making significant efforts to manage these assets with a range of asset management policies, system/program integration approaches, data collection methods and costs, benefit quantification, and asset category prioritization approaches. The results highlight the state of practice of managing ancillary transportation assets, revealing the dynamic nature of these activities as agencies evolve their activities to higher levels of program maturity.

Cast-iron pipes installed between 1850 and the early 1960s in North America, United Kingdom, and European countries were produced in foundries located near growing urban centers. Their considerable weight, size (especially larger-diameter pipes), and limited transportation facilities made their handling and delivery to the installation site difficult. Historical anecdotal evidence exists to suggest that some cast-iron pipes may have been damaged during delivery. This paper examines different mechanical models to examine what specific conditions may have led to pipe damage during delivery and installation. Analyses show that if pipes did incur damage, then cracks were likely to have occurred on the inside of the pipe bell or spigot ends. Furthermore, it appears that the spigot ends of smaller-diameter pipes had higher risk of damage during delivery, whereas both bell and spigot ends faced increased risk of damage in larger-diameter pipes. Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to account for uncertainties in the parameters that were used in the different models.

The costs involved in right-of-way (ROW) acquisition are rapidly increasing, making it more difficult for agencies to complete projects on time and budget. When funds are constrained, the question of what parcels should be purchased first to minimize the overall costs becomes relevant. The answer is related to the timing of the acquisition process and even opens the possibility of early ROW acquisition. Traditionally, early ROW purchases are selected based on expert judgment and on individual analyses, resulting in purchasing too late and having no substantial savings, if any. This paper presents an event-driven simulation model developed by Texas A&M for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to estimate costs and predict potential savings under different ROW acquisition scenarios. The Texas A&M Simulation Model (TAMSIM) is used to assist in prioritizing what parcels should be purchased first due to their likelihood of having a substantial cost increase. Four projects (Metro-East, Urban-North, Urban-South, and Rural-West) are used as case studies to demonstrate the applicability of TAMSIM.

The authors apply a statistical process control framework to support structural health monitoring of the Grace Church building in Charleston, South Carolina. Specifically, they conduct a post-hoc analysis of displacement data acquired via remote monitoring of delamination between two wythes of brick in a clerestory wall. The framework consists of formulation and estimation of statistical models to explain the progression of the measurements under ordinary conditions and use of control charts to detect unusual events. One such event was excessive displacement in September 2011 that led the engineer of record to close the building to public access and order immediate repairs. The analysis also reveals a few unusual events that were not apparent from visual interpretation of the data, including a possible precursor to the aforementioned event.

The collection and organization of data for infrastructure assessment have traditionally been laborious and lengthy tasks. Smartphones now provide the needed hardware and software to ease the burden of these chores. The authors have developed the Mobile Information Collection Application, which organizes these capabilities for infrastructure assessment. The use of this application in the 2011 Mississippi River flood of record and in the reconnaissance of routes for movement indicates that it can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of information collection and organization.