Understanding Critical Impacting Factors and Trends on Bridge Design, Construction, and Maintenance for Future Planning

Various impacting factors, such as economic growth, demographic trends, climate change, and technology advancement have driven the changes in the infrastructure sector at an unprecedented speed. Bridges are an integral and important part of transportation infrastructure systems and are inevitably being affected by these factors. As a delivery solution to build and repair bridges with reduced traffic disruption and increased safety, accelerated bridge construction (ABC) is confronted with many challenges imposed by these factors. In this project, critical impacting factors are defined as the factors that may be considered unproven, lacking refinement, relatively unknown, but have the potential to affect bridge design, construction, and maintenance (DCM) in the short- or long-term. Some examples of critical impacting factors include connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), electrical vehicles, passenger drones, extreme weather events, sea level rise, and E-commerce, etc. These factors are occurring and evolving at an ever-increasing pace, and there is a growing awareness that these changes will reshape the way that bridges are being designed, constructed, and maintained over the next decades. It is thus imperative to understand these factors and their impact on bridge DCM in order to better fulfill the vision of ABC in the context of future infrastructure system. However, there is a lack of understanding on how these changes will affect bridge DCM and/or ABC in both the near term and long term, due to two challenges: (1) the difficulty in predicting the trends of these factors – whether it is a long-term lasting force or a temporary phenomenon, and (2) the challenge in understanding the interplay between these factors and bridge DCM and/or ABC.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • Contract to a Performing Organization has not yet been awarded.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3551747121

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Florida International University, Miami

  University Park, Room P.C. 539
  Miami, FL  United States  33199-0000

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Start Date: 20191201
• Expected Completion Date: 20201231
• Actual Completion Date: 20210401

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bridge construction; Bridge design; Bridge management systems; Forecasting; Impacts; Maintenance management; Transportation planning
• Subject Areas: Bridges and other structures; Construction; Design; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01727180
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Accelerated Bridge Construction University Transportation Center (ABC-UTC)
• Contract Numbers: 69A3551747121
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Jan 6 2020 1:47PM