Tech startup to maintain dozens of ageing bridges through AI
The New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv-based startup, Dynamic Infrastructure is expanding its pilot project with the Public Works Department of New York’s Suffolk County using the world’s first deep-learning solution which allows bridge and tunnel owners and operators to obtain visual diagnosis of assets they manage in order to reduce direct and indirect maintenance costs.
After the successful completion of a pilot involving one bridge, the parties have agreed to expand the use of the AI-based technology to 74 bridges in the county located on the eastern end of Long Island. Deployment of the technology is currently in process.
Dynamic Infrastructure is currently conducting projects in other states in the US as well as in Germany, Switzerland, Greece, and Israel with private and public transportation bodies. The company’s clients operate a total of 30,000 assets, ranging from national, state, regional and municipal departments of transportation to Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) and private companies.
“The latest project expansion aims to use our technology to cover the entire inventory by Q2 2021,” said Saar Dickman, Co-founder, and CEO of Dynamic Infrastructure. He added that Suffolk County is typical of the situation in the US at large, where data from the Federal Highway Administration deemed that approximately 30% of all bridges in the US were in fair or poor condition.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which evaluates and publishes a report card on the US infrastructure every four years, the country’s infrastructure was given a D+ grade and more than 56,000 bridges were classified as being 'structurally deficient'.
The aim in the deployment in Suffolk County is to enable its Public Works Department to better coordinate and make the right decisions by prioritising maintenance of its infrastructure assets.
“The system allows any operator, inspector or maintenance engineer to have actionable intelligence at their fingertips in order to decide if, when and how the daily maintenance and maintenance projects should be conducted, by supplying instant alerts about anomalies,” said Kevin Reigrut, member of Dynamic Infrastructure’s board of advisors and former executive director of the Maryland Transportation Authority.
The use of the novel technology translates into a huge annual savings for the Owners, and Operation and Maintenance engineers, and contractors. Dynamic Infrastructure’s AI-based, decision making, SaaS product continuously processes past and current inspection reports and visuals, identifying future maintenance risks and evolving defects. The proprietary technology provides live, cloud-based, risk analysis of any bridge or tunnel and automatically alerts when changes are detected in maintenance and operating conditions - before they develop into large-scale failures.
The platform creates a 'visual medical record' for each asset, based on existing images taken from past and current inspection reports and interim inspections. The visual analysis is being done to any visual source, be it smartphones, drones, and laser scanning. The images are compared and serve as the basis for alerts on changes in maintenance conditions. They can be easily accessed through a simple browser and instantly shared with peers and contractors to speed maintenance workflows and improve budget expenditure.
Dynamic Infrastructure harnesses the power of AI to disrupt Operation & Maintenance of critical transportation assets. Founded by industry professionals with decades of operation and maintenance experience for PPPs and DOTs, Dynamic Infrastructure has become an industry leader and key driver of a data revolution in decision-making processes related to bridge and tunnel Operations & Maintenance. Headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in Germany and Israel, Dynamic Infrastructure maintains a close relationship with its clients.
