Evaluating Bridge Reliability Following Natural and Man-Made Hazards in Real-Time: Formulating an International Collaborative Research Program, CMS proposal 0450420
PI: Ahmet Aktan, Drexel
This proposal is being submitted to NSF's Structural Systems and Engineering: Structural Systems and Hazards Mitigation of Structures program of the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems. Dr. Steven McCabe is the Program Director and Dr. Galip Ulsoy is the Division Director. The objective of the proposal is to solicit a small travel grant for a group of academic, government and industry representatives to travel from the US to Japan for three related purposes: (a) Participating at the International Association for Bridge Management and Safety Conference at Kyoto, Japan (IABMAS?04, 18-22 October, 2004), (b) Participating at a meeting of the Executive Council of the International Society for Structural Health Monitoring and Intelligent Infrastructures (ISHMII) that is being arranged to take place at Kyoto on October 20, (c) Participating at a half-day Workshop between the US and International participants of a problem-focused collaborative research project: "Evaluating the Reliability of Highway Bridges In Real-Time Following Hazards By Structural Health Monitoring" during 17 October.
The research project for "Bridge Reliability Following Hazards.." offers significant potential for buy-in from bridge owners. This is necessary to overcome the reluctance of most bridge owners to embrace new technology and to demonstrate how leveraging recent research and technology development pays by advancing the state-of-practice for post-hazard emergency response and recovery of the highway transportation infrastructure. We note that there is consensus between government engineers from State DOT's such as CALTRANS, as well as FHWA and USGS that reliable post-hazard condition assessment of critical elements of the highway infrastructure is perhaps the single most pressing problem urgently requiring research and leveraging of technology for advancing the state-of-practice. Based on various meetings between groups of stakeholders at Sacramento, Irvine and Bethlehem, the outline of a collaborative multi-institutional research project has been formulated by a group of academic, government and industry participants. The research will be detailed in a proposal before January '05. The US participants of this collaborative project will be soliciting funding from various federal and state government agencies, and especially the NEES Program, while the European and Japanese participants already have or will receive funding from their respective governments. The outline of this project and the current participants will be described further in the following. In addition to supporting the travel of a US delegation to continue building an extremely rewarding international collaboration with their counterparts from Canada, Europe and the Far East, a travel grant requested by this proposal will continue to serve for building a strategic relationship between the two U.S. federal government agencies that have responsibility for advancing the engineering and management of critical infrastructure systems. Since 23 April 2003, NSF and FHWA have been exploring a synergistic partnership for launching a holistic and problem-focused research initiative to enhance the operations, protection and preservation of the highway transportation infrastructure. This program is envisioned to take advantage of actual highways and bridges as test-sites that will be transformed into field laboratories for scientific research. There is further opportunity to expand an NSF-FHWA partnership by including USGS and NIST as we expect that delegates from these latter agencies will also be present. Additional information on the background of the proposed partnership for research and collaborations between the academic and industry communities associated with NSF and FHWA is presented in the following sections of the proposal.
