CAREER: Transportation Network Maintenance under Climate Change, Resource Uncertainties, and Connectivity

This Early Faculty Career Development (CAREER) project aims to improve transportation network maintenance with a focus on the growing severity and frequency of natural disasters due to climate change, resource uncertainties, and emerging data sources and implement an education program for next-generation transportation engineers, high school students, and the existing workforce with a focus on holistic thinking from a multidisciplinary perspective. Natural disasters substantially compromise regional transportation network’s mobility performance, reduce economic productivity, and create significant safety hazards to travelers.

Transportation agencies in the United States spend more than $2.3 billion annually for winter roadway maintenance alone. Systematic considerations of the uncertainty of long-term regional weather patterns due to climate change, maintenance resources, and new data sources can significantly improve the resilience of a resource-intensive transportation network maintenance.

This project will lay the groundwork for transforming traditional static transportation network maintenance operations into the next-generation data-driven and dynamic program that will reduce transportation infrastructure maintenance time and costs and minimize adverse societal impacts. The education program will train next-generation transportation professionals and the existing workforce and foster school students’ interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The goal of this project is to advance the scientific discovery in transportation network maintenance operations under growing climate change-induced adverse weather risks and uncertainties for the formulation of a robust, efficient, flexible, and reliable maintenance program. Advanced data-driven and machine learning-based emerging network modeling and analysis techniques will be developed to advance the understanding of the interrelationship between transportation networks and maintenance demand uncertainties in a regional roadway network.

This project will formulate and solve scientific problems critical for (i) understanding the dependency of different uncertainties in optimal maintenance activity center configuration at a regional scale, (ii) modeling the roadway condition observation location to improve the forecast of the transportation network condition and traffic pattern for timely and effective roadway maintenance, (iii) formulating the maintenance operations considering weather and resource uncertainties in a data-intensive environment, and (iv) characterizing the all-electric maintenance operations and charging infrastructure. The education plan will apply the multidisciplinary principles of engineering problem-solving in traditional civil/transportation engineering courses; prepare next-generation engineers through multidisciplinary research and education activities; develop and execute educational activities for K-12 to increase awareness about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines and careers; and execute outreach activities for dissemination of research findings.

This project is jointly funded by the Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.