Research

  • Transportation System Resilience, Social Equity and Accessibility
    • 2023
      • Sponsored by US Department of Transportation Center for Transportation, Equity, Decisions and Dollars
  • MTF-Resilience Initiative 2022
    • 2022
      • The Moving Teams Forward (MTF) Resilience Series aims to develop a megacommunity around building adaptive and transformative resilience to known and unknown threats.  Funded by the Georgia Tech Moving Teams Forward Seed Grant Program, the MTF-Resilience community building process involves academics and public sector, private sector and not-for-profit practitioners. 
  • Resilience in Transportation Planning and Decision Making
    • 2020
      • Sponsored by the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), this project addresses the research question: How does an agency move, in the most efficient manner, to augment its capabilities for planning and decision making to create an increasingly resilient system?
  • Black Swan Event Planning for Urban System Resilience
    • 2020
      • The growing frequency, intensity and duration of climate-related disasters worldwide poses many threats to critical infrastructure and communities, especially in regions that are particularly susceptible to extreme events. Predicting the magnitude and cascading effects of future events is difficult as many of the inputs and variables are not currently known. These kinds of deeply uncertain events, referred to as Black Swan Events, are impossible to predict; however, assessing and implementing approaches to plan for them is important to build resilience to this category of climate-related disasters.
  • AT&T Climate Resilience Community Challenge: Analysis of Inland Flood Risks and Enhancement of Regional Resilience
    • 2020
      • Georgia Tech is one of five universities selected to participate in the 2020 AT&T Climate Resiliency Community Challenge.  Georgia Tech’s Research Team partnered with Atlanta Regional Commission, Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, the City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management, Georgia Tech’s Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation Initiative, and, the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain at Georgia Tech.
  • Transportation Performance Management for Systems Operations
    • 2019
      • Sponsored by the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), this project assesses Transportation Systems Operation and Management (TSMO) best practices at the strategic, program and tactical levels.  It surveys the status of TSMO at GDOT, offers recommendations to move the agency to the next level of TSMO based on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), and, develops an analytic tool for reporting on transportation system performance (PM3) measures. 
  • Development of a Research Implementation Management Tool
    • 2018
      • The 2012 and 2015 national surface transportation legislation: MAP-21 (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century), and FAST (Fixing America’s Surface Transportation) have formalized a performance-based paradigm for decision making.  Performance-based research implementation management involves a formalized research implementation process to transform research results into standard operating procedures, services and products within an agency to help it better achieve strategic goals.  This study develops an evidence-based tool and database to support research implementation at the Georgia Department of Transportation.
  • Evidence-Based Decision Making: Developing a Knowledge Base for Successful Program Outcomes in Transportation Asset Management
    • 2018
      • MAP-21 and AASHTO’s framework for transportation asset management (TAM) offer opportunities to use more rigorous approaches to collect and apply evidence within a TAM context. This report documents the results of a study funded by the Georgia Department of Transportation, conducted by the Infrastructure Research Group (IRG) at Georgia Institute of Technology, to link TAM investments to outcomes.
  • Sustainable Development Modeling, Evaluation & Policy Development
    • 2015
      • The line of research on sustainable development modeling and evaluation has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Transportation.   The work has focused on the development of a conceptual and analytical framework to operationalize and evaluate sustainable development for communities and infrastructure systems.  The emergent definition of sustainable development is development of any capital asset(s) (e.g., human capital) within the constraints of other capital assets on which the primary asset(s) of interest is/are dependent, while reducing or minimizing sustainable development risks and opportunity costs. 
  • STEM and Our Future Transportation Leaders
    • 2015
      • In the next ten years, about 40 to 50 percent of the transportation workforce is expected to retire with the influx of the “Baby Boomer” generation to the retirement pool.  As such, there is the need for investments in programs that encourage younger generations to pursue careers in transportation.  Evidence in research has shown that students are more likely to choose transportation as a specialization if they are better informed about the profession.
  • Managing Transportation System Health: Setting Performance Targets and Policies in Non-Uniform Regions and Jurisdictions to Achieve Uniform Statewide and National Objectives
    • 2015
      • The current surface transportation legislation: Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), has clearly articulated a performance-based process for decision making with designated performance objectives. As regulations for the legislation are rolled out, a key challenge for performance-based planning will be how best to manage transportation system performance in non-uniform metropolitan regions and local jurisdictions to achieve uniform statewide and national objectives.
  • Transportation Asset Management: Risk-Based Inventory Expansion and Data Needs Assessment
    • 2012
      • For many years, several State DOTs and local transportation agencies have been concerned with applying asset management techniques to pavements and bridges, with less attention given to roadway ancillary structures such as earth retaining structures, traffic signs and signals, guardrails, lighting, and environmental mitigation features.  In the current economic climate, a growing number of agencies are adopting a more strategic decision-making process for roadway ancillary structures. 
  • Impact of Environmental Justice Analysis on Transportation Planning
    • 2011
      • The Environmental Justice field has grown since the signing of Executive Order 12898 in 1994.  The Executive Order required agencies receiving federal funds to develop and implement Environmental Justice strategies.  The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) developed a program with three fundamental principles for the Transportation sector
  • Studying the Sustainability of Ghana’s Transportation System
    • 2011
      • In Spring 2011, several members of the Infrastructure Research Group (pictured below) traveled to Ghana for a transportation study tour. Ghana is a democratic country in Western Africa with a population of approximately 22 million and land area comparable to the state of Oregon. It is a developing country with a growing, urbanizing population. The purposes of the visit were to investigate Ghana’s transportation challenges and opportunities for sustainable development and to establish relationships with researchers, consultants, and leaders in the transportation community.
  • Undergraduate Research
    • 2001-2019
      • This page documents work done by undergraduate students and alumni as a part of the Infrastructure Research Group.