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72 C H A P T E R 9 This assessment process manual provides guidance to help ensure a highly coordinated and efficient workflow for the assessing, coding, and marking of critical highway structures in response to a wide range of emergency events. The recommended methodology was designed to be practical and flexible so that it can be implemented by a wide range of SHAs while still establishing uniform best practices across the United States. To ensure an efficient assessment process that optimally allocates resources, a multi-tiered approach with appropriate redundancy was designed. The strategy is grounded in frequent planning and preparation efforts (âFirst You Planâ) supported by the appropriate responder training. The assessment, coding, and marking process was subdivided into four stages: Fast Reconnaissance, Preliminary Damage Assessment, Detailed Damage Assessment, and Extended Investigation. This manual focused on the first two (FR and PDA). For the FR and PDA, element damage ratings and an overall marking classification were proposed. Roles of different personnel involved with the response at each stage during emergency events were developed considering the expertise levels of the responders and to ensure efficient allocation of limited resources. The proposed procedures and operational workflows can be utilized for rapid assessments during emergency situations and can be combined with the National Bridge Inspection Stan- dards. These procedures were developed to be compatible with the National Incident Manage- ment System and the stateâs Incident Command Systems, and to facilitate communication and coordination with other federal and state agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. When fully implemented, the process will improve coordination and communication within and between relevant agencies. Preparing for emergency response can be overwhelming given the complexities and num- ber of unknown variables. It is important that an agency starts the process and continues to improve it when allocating scarce resources prior to an event. With time and practice, personnel will become more comfortable and confident that they can respond when necessary. After the response is complete for an event, it is important to review the response efforts and update the ERP accordingly. While this assessing, coding, and marking system was developed based on todayâs state of the practice, supporting technologies for structural inspection evolve quickly with scientific and technological advances occurring at an increasing rate. All stages of the assessment process will benefit from the appropriate integration of technology. However, implementation of new technologies should consider organizational and technological maturity. For FR, many advancing technologies, such as remote sensing, lidar, and structural health monitoring, may become much more useful in providing real-time, or near-real-time, emer- gency and damage information with computing and damage (health) analytics likely to mature Conclusions and Future Outlook
Conclusions and Future Outlook 73 in the near future. Additionally, the use of single, small unmanned aerial and terrestrial vehicles or swarms of micro unmanned vehicles is expected to become widespread in the near future. Developments such as the integration of automatic positioning, vision-based navigation, and on-board photogrammetry will enable these vehicles to fill a significant gap between remote sensing-based and ground-based FR. In addition, crowdsourcing technologies have been proven effective toward providing real-time emergency information. It is expected that the widespread use and the promise of crowdsourcing as a result of augmented-, mobile- and cloud-computing advances and software design will play major roles in facilitating much faster and reliable reconnaissance. In the case of PDA, mobile smart devices that integrate imaging, computing, GPS, communica- tion, and smart apps are becoming ubiquitous today in normal, everyday use, enabling the notion of smart inspection, marking, and coding to become the norm in the not-too-distant future. Significant advances may be on the horizon to integrate wearable smart devices (e.g., Google Glass), augmented reality, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. This may make it feasible to realize semi-automatic assessment of highway structures based on collected imagery. Eventually, autonomous PDA may be ultimately realized as human-based PDA is replaced in the long term with robotic, computer vision, and artificial intelligence technologies. Finally, advanced GIS integration and interoperability technologies and infrastructure will become essential to support all assessment stages in the near-future given trends toward big data in transportation asset management, remote sensing, autonomous vehicles, mobile computing, and crowdsourcing technologies that support disaster response (Japan Science and Technology Agency/National Science Foundation 2014).
