IRSV, an Integrated Visual Analytics Bridge Management System

A well-established bridge management system is crucial to secure our nation's public safety. However, elaborate and comprehensive inspections would result in vast amounts of heterogeneous data making it difficult for bridge managers to analyze the data effectively and to make appropriate maintenance decisions. In this paper, an Integrated Remote Sensing and Visualization (IRSV) bridge management system is proposed to help bridge managers to comprehend voluminous, heterogeneous bridge data from four essential perspectives: geospatial, temporal, relational and per-bridge attributes. By coordinating these four perspectives, IRSV provides bridge managers an interactive data exploration environment that helps bridge managers evaluate bridge assets based on both their internal factors such as structural integrity and external factors such as traffic patterns and surrounding environments. Unique to the IRSV system is the integration of the highly interactive visualizations with a knowledge base via a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Bridge managers can use IRSV for knowledge creation via the visualization/ontology cycles. Ultimately, IRSV intends to achieve greater operational efficiencies and effectiveness by allowing bridge managers to identify trends in system specifics (e.g., in individual bridge structural integrity), region (e.g., in environmental patterns or traffic load patterns), and procedures (e.g., in inspection reporting practices).