With the recent wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles, natural disaster recovery is on people’s minds. With so many types of aid being required to come into such densely urban neighborhoods, efficiencies and logistics play a key role in the successful recovery of life, assessment of damage. Keeping roads open and transportation systems up and running can make or break recovery efforts.
Researchers at UTSA are researching ways to apply AI to transportation issues that follow earthquakes that have promise for application to other kinds of natural disasters and other kinds of contexts.
“Making restoration decisions for regional transportation networks in a post-earthquake environment is highly complicated due to many uncertainties and resource constraints throughout the entire restoration time horizon,” says Ao Du, assistant professor in civil engineering and construction management.
And while it may take a while for communities to rebuild following something like an earthquake, Du and Jiannan Cai are hoping their work in AI can help alleviate that.
“Recent advances in AI allow for adaptive decision-making to help restoration teams prioritize which roads, bridges or rail lines need fixing first,” Du says.
Du added that that their research can help speed up decision making related to repairing transportation infrastructure— making it easier to bring in relief supplies, search and rescue teams and reconstruction crews.
Since stakeholders are usually the ones who make the final restoration decisions, this project will offer “more transparent and risk-informed explanations of the AI-derived policies for trustworthy post-earthquake restoration planning,” Cai says.
“Such information can be very helpful, especially in a post-disaster situation where the stakeholders need to make rapid and strategic decisions under huge stresses,” she adds.
For this project, Du and Cai chose to focus on transportation networks given the highly uncertain nature of earthquakes and their hazardous impact on an area’s physical infrastructure. However, the hope is that the research can be expanded to help in other events.
“This has the potential to be adapted and generalized to deal with the restoration of other types of infrastructure systems affected under other types of natural disasters,” Du says.
The professors were awarded a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for this project.
The grant is part of the $7.1 million Disaster Resilience Research Grant program, which is funding research to improve the ability of communities, infrastructure, and buildings to withstand severe natural disasters.
UTSA is one of just 15 universities to receive a grant.
