InfoBridge – Bridging Data to the Cloud

The Long-Term Bridge Performance (LTBP) InfoBridge web-portal was developed and deployed by iENGINEERING in collaboration with the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Long-Term Infrastructure Performance (LTIP) team. The LTIP team provided subject-matter expertise for the design, development and data management of the web-portal. The LTIP team also provided quality assurance and support during different stages of the project. The collaborative effort resulted in the development of a robust cloud hosted data-portal that allows FHWA to manage and maintain data collected from different sources under the LTBP program.

LTBP Bridge thumbnail

The Long-Term Bridge Performance (LTBP) Program is a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) research effort to help the bridge community better understand bridge performance. The overall objectives of the LTBP Program are to monitor representative samples of bridges nationwide to collect, document, maintain, manage, and disseminate high-quality quantitative performance data over an extended time horizon. This will be accomplished by taking advantage of advanced nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies in addition to traditional visual bridge inspection approaches. Achieving these objectives requires close collaboration with State transportation departments, academia, and industry. The LTBP Program is designed to collect critical performance data that are not available elsewhere and merge them with data gathered from available sources.

The bridge data was collected from different areas such as NBI, NBE, Climate, and LTBP without any standard procedures in place. Therefore, FHWA required a systematic way to organize the data storage and streamline the data upload/update processes. It required development of the LTBP InfoBridge Information Management System (IMS) which included developing a framework for the IMS database modeling and development of processes for data uploads. Additionally, several enhancements and feature updates were planned to improve the usability and user experience of the previous system. In a nutshell, the FHWA required a user-friendly means to make the collected data publicly available with the convenience of a few clicks.

iENGINEERING designed and developed the LTBP InfoBridge Portal that effectively addresses all these requirements. The InfoBridge web portal and IMS is a centralized gateway providing efficient and quick access to bridge performance-related data and information. The portal includes multiple tools that facilitate bridge data analytics. It provides storage, retrieval, dissemination, analysis, and visualization of data collected through the State, National, and LTBP Program efforts. This provides users with the ability to holistically assess bridge performance data on a network or individual bridge basis.

LTBP InfoBridge screenshot

InfoBridge is embedded with a number of interactive tools and user-friendly features to empower the users in performing quick searches and retrieving the required data. The application can present the results in a paginated tabular view, as well as plot them on a GIS map interface. Performance data and statistics are presented on the performance dashboard that displays bar charts, tabulated summaries, and historical performance graphs corresponding to the selected bridges. Users can utilize the extensive bridge performance data contained within InfoBridge to view, develop, and improve forecasting models for bridge performance.

iENGINEERING continues to provide support, maintenance and enhancement services for the project. The second release of InfoBridge has been launched in the start of 2019 which contains enhanced data analysis and visualization tools, ensuring an improved user-experienced.