Remember the children's’ nursery rhyme ‘London bridge is falling down’? Well, that’s too bad for London and its bridge, but if you’re from Long Island you have no need for concern with Israeli technology ensuring the structural strength of the of the city’s bridges.
Israeli startup Dynamic Infrastructure, develops disruptive technology that provides critical transportation infrastructure an AI maintenance solution, has partnered with New York’s Suffolk County on to pilot deploying deep learning technology on bridge and tunnel structural diagnosis.
Bridges in the U.S. receive D+... not good
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 company uses a combined drone, smartphone, and laser scanning imaghing solutions to continuously compare with older images and alert in real-time for any default in structure.
The two parties have also recently expanded the pilot to over 70 bridges throughout eastern Long Island’s critical transportation channels. The Israeli startup’s technology will offer bridge and tunnel operators visual diagnosis of assets they manage in order to reduce direct and indirect maintenance costs.
Sit down because this may shock you. The company reports that according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which evaluates and publishes a report card on the U.S. 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 prioritizing 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 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.
Dynamic Infrastructure was founded in 2018 by CEO Saar Dickman and Amichay Cohen, and is headquartered in New York with offices in Germany and an R&D center in Tel Aviv. The European based offices help the company manage ongoing projects, similar to the Long Island one, in Germany, Switzerland, Greece, and Israel.
