Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Civil infrastructure systems are the most expensive assets in any country. In Canada their value is an estimated CAD$2 trillion. These structures are deteriorating at an alarming rate due to inadequate maintenance, excessive loading, economically-driven design practices, and adverse environmental conditions. Feedback on the state of health of today's civil infrastructure is practically non-existent. It has been estimated that decades of under funding have left Canada with about CAD$60 billion in outstanding infrastructure repair and replacement cost. Such a problem is not unique to Canada. In a new report released March 25, 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimated that the US needs to invest US$2.2 trillion of repairs and upgrades over the next 5 years to bring its infrastructure to an acceptable level. Bridges and road networks are two of the key components of Canadian infrastructure. Current monitoring techniques for the infrastructure are manual, error-prone, and temporally-sparse. Therefore, new systems and methodologies are needed for effective and yet economically-tractable monitoring of Canada's decaying bridges and road network. The design criteria for the proposed system and methodology include: a) allowing for more frequent inspection of the roads and bridges while reducing the cost and increasing the quality of the monitoring process, b) using low-cost and durable sensors, and c) having on-site artificial intelligence. This research will be achieving these goals using a mobile mapping system for coarse-scale monitoring, where problem areas are identified and the deployment of a fine-scale monitoring system for detailed inspection of problem areas.