Streamlining field inspections for infrastructures life-cycle management

Abstract

In the Era of Cloud Computing, mobile devices are playing a determinant role in how people communicate and work. With impressive computational e graphical capabilities modern mobile devices are showing to be true candidates to assume control in processes until now paper-based. With that line of though, infrastructure managers are becoming prone to take advantage of mobile devices for the inspection and management tasks. A study was carried out to unveil the latent needs of infrastructures managers and infrastructures inspectors. A platform, for a tablet pc, is being developed for inspection tasks in order to expedite the processes of storing and using of information. The platform might be remotely connected to a database to present standard inspection files, combined with the possibility of obtaining technical information of the element being inspected (such as historical data, previous inspections data, theoretical-technical information, etc.) in order to increase the inspections’ objectivity. This platform aims to make information available in real-time and aims to be a step forward to standardize and automatize the inspections’ classification. The inspection results will be converted into normalized indexes to be used in optimization models (considering the infrastructures performance and constraints) to trace the best scenarios for maintenance/intervention.