Information Management of a Lifeline Infrastructure for Mobility of People and Goods

Intermodal logistics among other critical infrastructure systems relies on principled management practices to prevent catastrophic failures and improve long-term planning solutions. These practices face several challenges with respect to information management. While data is continuously collected and artifacts are produced, the unstructured storage and dissemination of data will inherently degrade an organization’s knowledge repository. A fractured state of organizational data will impede strategic investments by constraining a system's resources. Transportation infrastructure includes additional challenges because they are composed of dispersed physical assets that must consider spatial association and interdependencies. To mitigate these challenges, an organization can embrace a centralized knowledge repository that integrates geospatial features of physical systems and organizational process assets. This paper describes an innovation that achieves geospatial operations management and data analytics, which has been implemented for a multi-disciplinary transportation agency. The system provides stakeholders (e.g., local community, international freight carriers, multimodal transportation planners, maritime ports, system operators, et al.) with tools and information that support the management of project planning, costs, resources, risk, communication, and procurements with a geospatial model-based application. The application serves as the primary knowledge repository that supports multi-criteria decision analysis of transportation system operations. The innovation is demonstrated for a transportation agency responsible for more than 90,000 km of road infrastructure, 7000 personnel, 400 annual infrastructure projects, and an annual operating budget of more than 7 billion USD.