Civil engineering faculty Dr. James Tsai traveled to China's ChangAn University in June to give a featured lecture, "Pavement Preservation and Management Challenges and Opportunities: from Automatic Pavement Crack Detection to Diagnosis.” A Changjiang Scholar and noted transportation engineer, Tsai discussed the opportunities and challenges of pavement preservation and management in the United States and China.
Located in Xian, China, ChangAn University specializes in highway construction, preservation, and maintenance. It is one of the oldest and most influential highway construction and management universities in China.
Tsai’s recent research work, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the USDOT, has foucsed on developing a multi-scale crack fundamental element (CFE) model that enables researchers to represent crack characteristics topologically at multi-scales.
“This multi-scale CFE model provides a crucial research foundation for transforming an automatically derived crack map into meaningful decision-making information" he said.
In his presentation,Tsai also looked at how this multi-scale CFE model can assist in determining pavement preservation timing and methods.
“There are fascinating opportunities provided by automatic pavement crack detection, which enables researchers to observe and analyze the behavior of large-scale, in-field infrastructure at a detailed level impossible in the past," Tsai said.
“There are even greater opportunities when we are able to transform automated detected crack maps into meaningful decision-support information through automatic crack diagnosis and take full advantage of sensor and information technologies.”