Tag Archives: asset management

AI-mediated transportation asset management

This article is called “Cities and states are turning to AI to improve road safety“. Basically the concept is to pay private vehicle owners to install dashboard cameras which take video of street conditions and feed it into a central database. What makes it “AI” seems to be computer-assisted analysis of the videos.

This all makes sense to me, although I wonder if you just put this technology on all the public fleet vehicles out there (buses, police cars, fire trucks, public works vehicles, maybe partner with utility companies) if that would be enough.

I do like the idea of focusing more on the infrastructure itself when it comes to safety, rather than vehicles and their drivers which is essentially blaming the victim. With gradual advent of autonomous vehicles, I see a shift in attitudes towards zero tolerance of deaths and injuries. Early on, my thought was that this was unfair because human-controlled vehicles cause so many deaths and injuries and we tend to think of these as inevitable. But as I have thought about it more, the public has essentially zero tolerance for deaths and injuries on any form of public transportation, whether trains, buses, or planes. It is time we held motor vehicles and the infrastructure they are traveling on to this same standard, and the trend seems to be in that direction.

The other positive trend here is a core principle of asset management itself. We all know infrastructure is expensive and difficult to build and maintain, but it does wear out and need to be repaired and eventually replaced. Each time you do a repair or a replacement, you have a chance to upgrade at low or sometimes no extra cost. Any single piece of infrastructure lasts a long time, but there are always things wearing out here and there throughout the system. So if you have a solid vision of where you want to go and you make those repair/replace/upgrade decisions consistent with it, small changes can add up to big system change over time, and this can be done cost-effectively. We don’t need “AI” to do this necessarily, but if calling it AI helps us get over the psychological hurdle to actually make it happen, let’s go for it!

October 2024 in Review

Only half way through November – here is an “October in Review” post.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: When it comes to the #1 climate change impact on ordinary people, it’s the food stupid. (Dear reader, I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t consider myself stupid, but somehow we individually intelligent humans are all managing to be stupid together.) This is the shit that is probably going to hit the fan first while we are shouting stupid slogans like “drill baby drill” (okay, if you are cheering when you hear a politician shout that you might not be stupid, but you are at least uninformed.)

Most hopeful story: AI, at least in theory, should be able to help us manage physical assets like buildings and infrastructure more efficiently. Humans still need to have some up-front vision of what we would like our infrastructure systems to look like in the long term, but then AI should be able to help us make optimal repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions that nudge the system toward the vision over time as individual components wear out.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Some explanations proposed for the very high cost of building infrastructure in the U.S. are (1) lack of competition in the construction industry and (2) political fragmentation leading to many relatively small agencies doing many relatively small projects. Some logical solutions then are to encourage the formation of more firms in the U.S., allow foreign firms and foreign workers to compete (hardly consistent with the current political climate!), and consolidate projects into a smaller number of much larger ones where economies of scale can be realized. There is some tension though between scale and competition, because the larger and more complex a project gets, the fewer bidders it will tend to attract who are willing to take the risk.

AI and asset management

This article is about AI and predictive building maintenance. It also reads like an IBM corporate press release, but nonetheless it sparks some interesting thoughts. Recently I was at a conference where a friend of mine was on stage and as asked what technologies would be most important for the future of public infrastructure (water infrastructure, in the case of this particular conference.) AI and asset management came to my mind, and I willed my friend to also think of this. Alas, he did not. Now, if I had been up there would I have been able to articulate my thoughts clearly on the spot? Probably not, but with the benefit of a few minutes to think here is what I fantasize I might have said.

Basically, AI should be pretty good at asset management. Given good data on assets and their ages, they should be able to identifying assets (we’re talking physical assets here, like pipes or electrical equipment, or even green infrastructure like street trees) that are nearing the end of their service life and likely to fail in the engineering sense of no longer serving their intended purpose efficiently. Or, somewhat obviously, when things really have failed AI can help get that information to the attention of whoever can actually do something about it. Well, I still think humans have to do the up-front planning and have some vision for what they would like the infrastructure system to look like 20, 30, 50 years down the line. But then, AI should really be able to help with those repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions, so that as things wear out the system is slowly nudged in the direction of that long-term vision, all while minimizing life cycle cost and balancing whatever other objectives the owners or stakeholders might have. This all looks good on paper and is messy to do with a mish-mash of real-world governments and institutions and companies, but having the vision is a start.

masks, ventilation, and filtration work in schools; social distancing and plexiglass don’t do anything

There, I think my headline summarized by layman’s understanding of this study published by CDC. I’m hoping my (rising) third grader won’t have to wear a mask to school in the fall, but that wouldn’t be the end of the world. What I’m really hoping for is five full-time in-person school days, which kids really need for normal educational and social development at this point. Masks would be a small price to pay for that until younger children can be vaccinated, but really can we speed that up.

I’ll give the School District of Philadelphia some praise for comprehensive testing of its HVAC systems district wide, followed by correction of problems. What they found though was that many classrooms had no functioning ventilation at all! I suspect they were like that for many decades. How many flu epidemics ravaged the city in that time because this city has a culture of accepting amateurism, mediocrity, and incompetence? I want to see the pandemic money spent to bring school buildings up to date, starting with HVAC and air conditioning. Air conditioning isn’t a luxury these days. It’s getting hotter and this would mean the buildings could be used year-round which could have enormous benefits.