A Bridge Digital Twin for Enhancing Transportation Resilience and Asset Management

As the Region 6’s transportation network exponentially grows, each DOT requires seamless collaboration of relevant stakeholders with bridge infrastructure construction and maintenance data organized in an integrated, safe, trusted, and interoperable manner. Since bridges encompass several vulnerable components, they should be carefully managed, maintained, and monitored by DOTs in each state. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), according to Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, requires all states to perform a biennial inspection for each bridge to document its condition for maintaining, repairing, and rehabilitating bridges. The Louisiana Department of Transportation & Development (LaDOTD) performs inspections on nearly 13,000 bridges at least every two years including 16,387,706 square feet of bridge deck, which ranks 4th in total bridge area in a nation. However, state DOTs have separately stored and managed the data of numerous bridges as engineering design/drawing information, asset maintenance data, and field inspection data. The primary issue is that these data and database are not consistently connected and linked. Currently, since the majority of bridge inspection methods use printed checklists, their interpretation is labor intensive, subject to personal judgment, and prone to error. In addition, because of a large number of bridges and consequently enormous amount of maintenance data generated by periodic inspections, it is highly possible to encounter data loss and sparse data management. In addition, even though the bridge management system (BMS), which helps manage bridge design, construction, and maintenance data, has been widely used in DOTs, the systems of Region 6 DOTs have heterogeneous bridge data formats and information structures that prevent seamless collaboration and data sharing, providing the insufficient capability to fully integrate and exchange bridge asset and maintenance data. This challenge has been caused by the lack of integrated digital systems for integrating all bridge facility management data. The primary objective of this proposed project is to explore and develop a digital twin prototype for bridge management. Bridge Information Modeling (BrIM) is the specialization of BIM to bridge projects, but its use in transportation infrastructure is severely limited due to the lack of standardization. Recently, there are an extensive effort such as the AASHTO Bridge Modeler from different entities to develop, implement, standardize, and demonstrate an efficient and robust digital data exchange protocol that could be used to digitally describe bridge engineering information. If successful, this research outcomes will bring the new scientific knowledge on the implications of the digital twin technology that bridge infrastructure and maintenance data using the latest BrIM technology can be accumulated, managed, and analyzed in an integrated platform. The revealed data exchange processes and their requirements of transportation construction and maintenance can register new theoretical milestones in construction management, infrastructure maintenance, and information science. In addition, this project will provide the research community with the first bridge component detection method that is capable of automatically creating as-built BrIM models from terrestrial laser scanning data. Since bridge infrastructure systems are stretched over Region 6 areas, their integrated bridge maintenance and inspection data management will be an invaluable asset for Region 6. In addition, DOTs are responsible for performing inspections on all of all bridges at least every two years, or more frequently if deemed necessary. If successful, the results from this study will assist on the bridge inspection process conducted at least every two years, by reducing manual work to save inspection time and cost, which will assure the timely inspection of the bridges within Region 6 in case of severe broad damages caused by natural disaster.

Language

  • English

Project

  • Status: Active
  • Funding: $60000
  • Contract Numbers:

    69A3551747106

  • Sponsor Organizations:

    Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

    University Transportation Centers Program
    Department of Transportation
    Washington, DC  United States  20590
  • Managing Organizations:

    Transportation Consortium of South-Central States (Tran-SET)

    Louisiana State University
    Baton Rouge, LA  United States  70803
  • Project Managers:

    Mousa, Momen

  • Performing Organizations:

    Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

    P.O. Box 94245, Capitol Station
    Baton Rouge, LA  United States  70803
  • Principal Investigators:

    Lee, Yongcheol

  • Start Date: 20210801
  • Expected Completion Date: 20210201
  • Actual Completion Date: 0
  • USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers Program

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01832347
  • Record Type: Research project
  • Source Agency: Transportation Consortium of South-Central States (Tran-SET)
  • Contract Numbers: 69A3551747106
  • Files: UTC, RIP
  • Created Date: Jan 10 2022 2:38PM