Leveraging Employee and Expert Knowledge to Improve Infrastructure Management and Risk Communication
Authors:   , Jackson Emily Mayme , Gurian Patrick L 
Published: July 2024

Existing infrastructure management approaches have not been able to maintain the condition and reliability of aging bridge infrastructure in the United States. Budget constraints often prevent or delay completion of necessary maintenance leading to suboptimallifecycle performance and increased traffic and congestion. Approximately 26% of bridges in the US are rated as either functionally deficient or structurally obsolete (ASCE, 2009). Knowledge management systems can be used by infrastructure owners to utilize resources more effectively and optimize the timing of maintenance repairs. This thesis begins by describing the basic principles and techniques of knowledge management. Preliminary progress in applying these approaches to an infrastructure owner is documented, and the remaining steps that would be required to fully implement knowledge management practices are outlined. These additional steps could include the adoption of an information management software system, and several commercially available software systems that can be customized to meet the needs elicited by this study have been identified for the infrastructure owner. However, the effort should not be confined to the development of new software tools but should include the development of procedures to identify and transfer implicit knowledge through monitoring, shadowing, and reflection on case studies. The infrastructure owner now has the opportunity to undertake a knowledge management program to improve the efficiency of current operations and aid in the storage and transfer of knowledge for the future. This program would extend the initial interviews that have been undertaken as part of this study to identify the existing organizational structure and management processes. The effort would propose an architecture for the knowledge management system that mirrors existing management structures and can accommodate the use cases identified here. The software systems used for information management tend to be efficient at data storage, but their decision support and analysis tools are often insufficient (Wang, 2010). The current state of the practice relies on expert knowledge to support decision making, and a stronger understanding of and ability to communicate risk will benefit infrastructure owners. To address this need, a survey was conducted to elicit expert opinions in order to evaluate whether a consensus exists on how to prioritize among competing non-urgent repair items. The survey aims not only to identify which factors should be prioritized, but also to help understand why. To do this, the survey takes into consideration the types of information that were identified as important for the decision making processes, including structural integrity, cost, safety, adverse impacts on other components, and the effects on deterioration. These important inputs can then be used to inform both future research and the development of guidance that would support general planning efforts. At the bridge . used to develop this survey, interviews indicate that essential maintenance repairs are most often driven by the safety attribute, but interestingly, this attribute was not among the three attributes most strongly correlated with repair priority, possibly because conditions with high safety concerns were addressed and did not appear on the list of repair considered. This leaves open the possibility that needed repairs may languish because engineering staff cannot classify them as safety related and readily communicate their importance. This study identifies other attributes that are correlated with expert-based priority for repair. These attributes may serve as a vocabulary for experts to communicate repair priorities to infrastructure owners and the public.