SMARTI project for rural bridge health management partnership between UNO, UNL: $1M NSF grant

A new regional innovation center, funded by a $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, will be geared toward producing a big data pipeline for rural bridge health management and will include civil engineering faculty from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Engineering. 

The Smart Big Data Pipeline for Aging Rural Bridge Transportation Infrastructure (SMARTI), which will be headquartered at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) College of Information Science and Technology (IS&T), is a partnership between IS&T and Nebraska Engineering. 

Led by principal investigator Robin Gandhi, UNO Charles W. and Margre H. Durham associate professor of cybersecurity, SMARTI brings together 16 researchers from across four focus areas. Also among the co-investigators on the project are the College of Engineering’s Daniel Linzell, Voelte-Keegan professor and department chair of civil engineering, and Chungwook Sim, assistant professor of civil engineering.

Support from NSF will allow the SMARTI research team to help standardize the data about aging bridges and make use of the massive amounts of information to help maintain and design safer bridges.

Over the course of three years, SMARTI will focus on mining existing data sets from private, state and federal partners, as well as collect new data through sensors on targeted rural bridges throughout Nebraska. The NSF support for SMARTI builds on a previous $100,000 grant for the Big Data Innovations for Bridge Health, awarded in 2016. The previous grant helped teams from UNO and UNL host collaborative conferences and workshops with key stakeholders to better identify the issues impacting rural bridge health. 

“By collecting, processing, and querying this data, we’ll be able to proactively predict the health of bridges and guide better asset management moving forward,” Linzell said. “This work will help standardize data collection in the infrastructure industry and help us make better decisions regarding bridge health for decades to come. It’s incredibly exciting to have support from the National Science Foundation to move forward on this project.”

Read the UNO story.

Grant project information: https://bridgingbigdata.github.io/