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Smart bridge technology – it’s unfortunate this wasn’t in place before the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis.  When you think of data analysis, information and data visualization, and dashboards, it doesn’t have to be limited to business and corporations.  With nearly $500 Billion potentially allocated to infrastructure in President Obama’s stimulus bill, the Department of Transportation and technology companies could be teaming up to bring us "smart" bridges that will alert us to potential hazardous conditions.

[source]

Some of the data provided by the sensors (per the article) in the bridge that could be presented in a dashboard type display is:

• Concrete temperature
• Vibrations
• Corrosion
• Ice buildup
• Traffic monitoring

Actionable analytics is what helps set corporations ahead of the pack.  There’s no reason we can’t bridge (pun intended) the gap to bring better technology and analytics to infrastructure and other non business sectors.

One of the enhancements to current bridges is a sensor that activates sprinkler heads in the pavement that would spread an anti-icing (potassium acetate) solution to prevent the bridge surface from forming ice.  This technology could make the signs reading "bridges freeze first" obsolete.

Fun fact: $500 Billion is more than the amount spent to build the entire Interstate Highway System in today’s dollars.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 7:10 am and is filed under Analytics, BI, Predictive Analytics, Tony, Visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.