The Future of Highway and Bridge Construction: Digital Project Delivery Using Integrated Advanced Technologies

Cost overruns, schedule delays, and quality issues negatively impact the majority of transportation infrastructure projects, and inspectors and project engineers are in short supply in rural and remote areas. Researched and tested technologies can solve most of the industry's challenges, but their level of acceptance and implementation is still quite low. The primary research goals of this study include (1) investigating current highway construction technologies that produce massive metadata related to costs, schedules, quality, and safety parameters; (2) exploring the need to integrate emerging and tested technologies into a single platform; and (3) proposing integrations that can produce semi-automated or simplified daily operations. An extensive literature review was conducted to understand the primary limitations of highway construction and the availability of tested technologies to overcome them. The findings of the study clearly indicate that integrating emerging technologies will open a wide array of opportunities such as predicting accurate construction costs, reducing the amount of time to complete projects, and increasing the overall quality of highway projects, and streamlining and centralizing the workforce system by implementing technology will solve the ongoing problem of workforce shortages. The findings of this study will help state DOTs better understand the value of each data layer that technology introduces throughout the deployment phase and the meaningful insights it can deliver using AI, machine learning, and big data.