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91 C H A P T E R 9 This report provides guidance to help ensure a highly coordinated and efficient workflow for the assessing, coding, and marking of 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 plan- ning and preparation efforts (First You Plan) supported by the appropriate responder training. The assessing, coding, and marking processes were subdivided into four stages: Fast Reconnais- sance, Preliminary Damage Assessment, Detailed Damage Assessment, and Extended Investiga- tion. This document focused on the first two (FR and PDA). For the FR and PDA, element damage ratings and an overall marking classification were proposed. Roles for the 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 integrated with the National Bridge Inspection Standards database. These procedures were developed to be compatible with the National Incident Manage- ment System and a 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 number of unknown variables. It is important that an agency starts the planning 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 and analyze the response efforts in order to update the emergency response plan 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 tech- nological advances occurring at an increasing rate. All stages of the assessment process will benefit from the integration of appropriate technology. However, implementation of new technologies should consider institutional 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, emergency and damage information with computing and damage (health) analytics likely to mature in the near Conclusions and Future Outlook
92 Assessing, Coding, and Marking of Highway Structures in Emergency Situations: Research Overview 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. Develop- ments 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, communi- cation, and smart apps are becoming ubiquitous today in normal and everyday use, enabling the notion of smart inspection, coding, and marking, which is expected 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 (e.g., Microsoft HoloLens), computer vision, and artificial intelligence. This may make it feasible to realize semi-automatic assessment of highway structures based on collected imagery or used in pre-event training with mixed realities. Eventu- ally, autonomous PDA may be ultimately realized as human-based PDA is replaced in the long term with breakthroughs in robotics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence technologies. Finally, advanced GIS integration and interoperability technologies will become essential to sup- port all assessment stages in the near future, given the trend toward big-data-enabled engineering in transportation asset management, remote sensing, autonomous vehicles, mobile computing, and crowdsourcing technologies that support disaster response (JST/NSF 2014). MAP-21 mandates that each state develop a risk-based asset management plan for the National Highway System to improve or preserve the condition of the assets and the performance of the system. These include new requirements for more detail to collect element-level information on assets. Emergency response procedures should be an integral part of the asset management plans of each SHA.
