Proceedings Article | 29 March 2019
KEYWORDS: Data modeling, Virtual reality, Augmented reality, Structural health monitoring, Optical inspection, Visual process modeling, Autoregressive models, Civil engineering, Safety, Inspection
Existing infrastructure in the U.S. is deteriorating; the symptoms of overdue maintenance and underinvestment are ever-present in our society (rated with D+ by American Society of Civil Engineers, ASCE). To ensure the safety of existing infrastructure, on-site life-time inspections and structural health monitoring are required. While these methods yield a great deal of raw and analyzed data, current methods for their simple and intuitive management, (i.e., simple and intuitive integration, documentation, access, and visualization), are severely lacking and can lead to mismanagement of infrastructure resources. New technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, combined with informational modeling, have a great potential to overcome this issue. The objective of this work is to develop a method of digital documentation for structural health assessment which is both efficient and effective. Therefore, it must not only achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted expense in terms of time, cost, and effort, but it must also be flexible enough to retain a diverse set of records such as logs from sensors during structural health monitoring, notes from visual inspection, etc. To address the above challenges, this work proposes a methodology for integrating existing data about a structure and meta-data into a combination of virtual tour (VT), augmented reality (AR) and informational modeling (IM) environment. This method will enable on- and off-site presentation of engineering assessment data in an organized, intuitive, and interactive manner, and additionally foster communication between different parties involved with a structure simultaneously or at different periods.
