Research

The Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport and its coastal area in Puerto Rico, an overseas US territory that needs resources to recover from Hurricane Irma and Maria and to face future devastating coastal hazards in the economic crisis, has been facing the challenge of coastal flooding, erosion, and storm damage. Fiel…

The primary goal of this proposal is to develop a comprehensive risk and resilience assessment framework for critical transportation and coastal infrastructure, using the RAMCAP framework as a baseline. The framework will identify potential risks to the infrastructure and analyze its resilience against natural and artifi…

Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence, a novel signal processing technique will be developed to build a surrogate model for an accurate prediction of engineering demand parameters of interest (e.g., peak column drift ratio). The epistemic uncertainty of the surrogate model will be quantified and integrate…

Performance- or risk-based earthquake engineering has gained widespread acceptance as a path to achieve user-specified performance targets, which include characterizations of casualties, repair cost, and business interruption, for intensity, scenario- and time-based assessments. There are tools whose roots are in U.S. nu…

This project aims to develop a 2-D hydrodynamic model to assess the extent/severity of flooding from extreme weather events (such as Hurricane Sandy) and to evaluate the efficiency of existing transportation infrastructure.

The model will incorporate a representation of the transportation system network, flood eve…

Major tunnel fires can lead to catastrophic events potentially resulting in the loss of lives, property damage, long service disruptions, and major socioeconomic impacts. A number of previous historical events confirm that tunnel fires may not necessarily cause collapse, but significant damage to the tunnel lining and lo…

The primary goal of this project is to analyze the failure of different types of transportation signage during Hurricane Maria. The specific objectives are:

• determine the causes of signage failure
• suggest improvements to the design and construction to avoid or reduce…
  

The primary goal of this proposal is to analyze pedestrian bridges that were damaged or collapsed during Hurricane Maria. The specific objectives of the project are:

• Develop an inventory of pedestrian bridges that were damaged or collapsed due to the hurricane and document the type of failures exp…
  

The primary goal of this project is to analyze motor vehicle bridges that were damaged or collapsed during Hurricane Maria. The specific objectives of the project are:

• develop an inventory of bridges that experienced damages or collapsed
• determine the causes of failu…
  

The risks associated with infrastructure are clearly identified but training to minimize the impact of these challenges is sparsely available or lacking in related content.  This project will design and establish academic credentials as well as non-credit short courses that will prepare participants to assess, mitigate …

The primary goal of this project is to understand the combined impact of corrosion and earthquake hazards on existing bridges, and the impact of repairs using cementitious composites on the vulnerability of bridges to these hazards. This will be achieved by establishing a probabilistic framework that can then be used to …

The overarching aim of the research is to explore and establish the ability of large-amplitude, forced vibration testing to reveal the current performance and forecast the future system performance of bridges, with the consideration of dynamic soil-foundation-structure effects. With the ability to perform reli…

According to FHWA, almost 36,000 bridges are located within 15 miles of the United States coastline. Many of these coastal bridges are vulnerable to storm surge and hurricane wave forces, and this is expected to worsen with rising sea levels associated with changing climate. The primary goal of this proposal is to lay th…

To protect the security of the public transportation infrastructure and the enormous amount of public assets, the proposed study intends to develop a decision support tool that can assist infrastructure stakeholders in making decisions at the day-to-day operation level (i.e. evacuation or shutting down of roads and bridg…

Risk- and resilience-based infrastructure asset management is timely and important for infrastructure owners to anticipate various natural and man-made hazards and maximize the duration and service performance of capital-intensive infrastructure, using an optimal allocation of limited financial resources. There is a pres…

The primary goal of this proposal is to develop a customized concept of operations (ConOps) of rail track asset management and risk management, built upon an understanding of existing practice, needs, and gaps. The ConOps will be customized to a particular rail agency: PATH.

This research will adopt an “user-in-…

Airfield Pavement Management collects data of structural condition such as fatigue cracking and rutting. However, important factors affect the safety of aircraft operations including non-structural distresses of low friction and surface distortion are missing in the data collection process. The goal of this research is t…

The Port Authority of NY & NJ is a leader nationally in incorporating climate resilience into major capital projects at the design phase. The agency has adopted comprehensive design guidelines to improve the resilience of agency infrastructure. However, the agency is interested in documenting leading practices at pee…

Resilience: “The ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events” Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative

While there are many definitions of resilience and almost as many measures of resilience, operationalizing the concept to be useful in decision makin…

The natural gas distribution system in the United States has 1.2 million miles of mains and about 65 million service lines (as of 2012). This distribution system, which consist of various material types, is subjected to various threats the impact of which differ depending on material, age, location, and operational funct…