摘要: |
Each state in the U.S. including Louisiana is responsible to oversee an enormous number of
construction and maintenance projects of transportation infrastructure systems such as
highways, bridges, tunnels, and other infrastructure structures. In addition, with the increase in
the need for constructing and repairing transportation systems, the state DOTs are daunted with
the mammoth task of multiple projects and unexpected maintenance caused by recent natural
disasters. This pandemic period has also been a strong driving force for DOTs to consider an
advanced approach to remotely govern and support these multiple transportation projects.
Organizing and overseeing a large number of transportation construction and maintenance
projects that generally entail several miles of a worksite are a critical burden for each DOT. In
addition, it requires manual monitoring of project or construction managers to identify a progress
status, a work activity, and a safety issue in a job site. Because of the projected huge volume,
complexity, significant impacts of future transportation infrastructure projects, it is evident that
we are now facing a critical need to create a means of improving the results of work zone
management and evaluating their impacts on our society. In addition, multiple work zones of a
large-scale highway construction project usually have to be managed and monitored by a
human effort on site, which is slow, inaccurate, and expensive. One primary problem in this
situation is that it has been increasingly challenging for each DOT to consistently monitor
progress of all projects in each state as well as efficiently evaluate work performance. With
limited human resources and time, DOTs in Region 6 States have managed large-scale
transportation construction and maintenance projects by a human inspection and recovered
direct and indirect damages of transportation infrastructure systems caused from the recent
natural disasters. Another critical issue is that this problem has prevented urban-level and
integrated project management. Since it is not feasible to identify the status and the progress of
numerous transportation infrastructure projects in real-time, DOTs cannot flexibly organize
project resources and schedule according to diverse external factors including uncertainties in a
worksite, mobility, natural disaster, and others. In particular, the lack of urban-level project and
progress data is expected to be a critical obstacle for sharing real-time construction worksite
information with autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars.
The primary goal of this project is to identify the characteristics of the digital twin technology that
are applicable to transportation construction and develop a conceptual framework of the
prototype with a participatory sensing concept to improve the construction process monitoring,
performance evaluation, and safety. The digital twin model incorporating the project information
and schedules analyzes on-going activities and conducts thereby urban-level monitoring of all
worksites. Recent research suggests that using only IoT sensors for capturing real-time data
may be insufficient for entirely grasping the real-life situation. Involving participatory sensing
along with IoT sensors for collecting real-time information can be a more efficient approach.
Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a conceptual framework of a digital prototype for
managing and monitoring transportation construction projects using sound-based real-time data
and participatory sensing along with the IoT sensors. This research involves sound-based data
collection as it was found that audio-based approach can be used for activity identification of
heavy-equipment with relatively high accuracy. Furthermore, sound-data as compared to image
data is lightweight and can be easily processed, does not require a minimum level of
illumination and thus is equally efficient during nighttime construction activities as daytime, and
sound-sensors can capture data from unlimited angles unlike image-sensors. |