This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The research objective of this BRIGE award is to initiate the first phase of a research program to develop a civil infrastructure asset management system to predict and optimize public school management of facility components that impact environmental health: asbestos-containing materials and lead-based paint. According to the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) report, Condition of America's Public School Facilities, approximately one-quarter of the nation's schools, housing 11 million children, require extensive repair. Nearly forty percent of the schools reported unsatisfactory environmental conditions. Given the constrained financial resources facing our national educational system, school decision makers are in need of systematic methods of evaluating risks associated with facility condition and prioritizing maintenance activities.
If successful, the results of this research will produce a set of objective and repeatable condition assessment methodologies, condition index algorithms, and material deterioration models for asbestos-containing materials and lead-based paint. These methodologies and models will be instrumental in achieving the research program future aim of developing a multi-objective life-cycle optimization conceptual framework for predictive and optimized maintenance of public school environmental health. This framework would allow for enhanced decision-making in selection of maintenance and capital outlay alternatives regarding all environmental health aspects of the public school infrastructure. This research will advance discovery in the field of civil infrastructure systems through its application to a novel domain, the nation's public schools, modeling and asset management strategies that have been successfully applied to other segments of the national infrastructure: roads, bridges, water supply, waste systems, and airports.
