Attendees at ENR's FutureTech East conference in New York City at the start of October explored the industry's future and looked inside a mid-size construction firm's innovation culture, including an invention that some are calling the Google Maps of construction. Rogers-O'Brien Construction is testing the software created by Joe Williams, director of technology, and Todd Wynne, construction technology manager, on projects.
Snooper vehicles hoist bridge inspectors over the side of a bridge. One department of transportation is testing the use of drones to do the inspections, replacing the traditional method.
A group of my graduate students at Texas A&M University’s construction science dept. mapped the 100-year history of technological development relevant to the construction industry in the form of a Facebook timeline.
Discovering future applications of current tech is a leadership theme of Manolis Kotzabasakis, the new chairman and CEO of Viewpoint Construction Software, who took the reins from Jay Haladay earlier this year.
A 32-acre, $6.5-million mini-city at the University of Michigan looks like a film set, with building facades that mask empty interiors or surround vacant lots. But the infrastructure in the ghost town is technologically advanced, with sensors and cameras attached to traffic signals that communicate with the cars on the street.
Map Courtesy of MoDOT Related Links: Smart Roads Ahead: The Rise of Intelligent Infrastructure The Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission (MHTC) will open a 200-mile stretch of Interstate 70, from Kansas City to St. Louis, to private industry for use as a “laboratory” for construction of future generations of highways. The Missouri Dept. of Transportation oversees “The Road to Tomorrow” project.Since June, MHTC has received about 180 proposals from academia and business, says Tom Blair, project leader and MoDOT assistant district engineer, St. Louis. He will present the 20 most promising submissions to MHTC in December.Blair says he and his
Photo Courtesy of N.H. DOT Related Links: Smart Roads Ahead: The Rise of Intelligent Infrastructure Smart vehicles, stupid infrastructure—that’s a phrase often invoked by Ted Zoli, national bridge chief engineer for HNTB, when he talks about the advent of connected vehicles that communicate with each other. He asks, will smart vehicles communicate with infrastructure? And will future infrastructure communicate with engineers?The answer is yes, he predicts. Further, he designed a test bed, the Memorial Bridge, which runs over the Piscataqua River between New Hampshire and Maine. The 1,200-ft-long, two-year-old bridge is becoming a “living bridge”—a piece of self-diagnosing, self-reporting smart
With the exponentially increasing ability to capture and analyze vast quantities of data from objects—bridge piers and pavements, for example—the dream of an intelligent transportation infrastructure (ITI) is within reach.
Related Links: The Digit Group The Digit Group Inc., Memphis, Tenn. designs smart cities, like Kingdom City in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In doing so, its CEO, Paul Doherty says the company is rethinking urban design. And they're changing it too, from the width of city streets, to the necessity of traffic signals and parking lots and even how the buildings communicate with one another. Doherty took a moment to give his thoughts on smart infrastructure and what he calls the Internet of Buildings.He told ENR how he sees city design changing the way we will build in the future and
A building superintendent turned professor used a bad experience placing concrete as the inspiration to develop a free, web-based application that tracks weather patterns and humidity levels to avoid cracking from plastic concrete shrinkage.
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