Abstract
In recent years, recognizing the importance of collecting and analyzing highway infrastructure data, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)launched an effort to develop a web-based system for collecting data on compliance review for the National Bridge Inventory (NBI). The intent of this project is to help the FHWA provide oversight to State Department of Transportation (DOT) to more efficiently perform their bridge inventory assessment and to help them reduce any possible human error related to random sampling and/or assessment record management. The Web-based systemhasfour main features: • Parse NBI Data • Perform Compliance Assessment • Generate an Assessment Report • Maintain Compliance Assessment History First, the system parses encoded data from NBI and stores the decoded data into a MySQL database. Second, the system provides functionalities to enable the users to perform compliance assessment, including form filling and file uploading. Third, the users are able to generate assessment report to serve their various needs. Finally, the system maintains compliance assessment history so the users can get back to any review sessions at any given time. Other features are built and made available to the users to support the main features. The system is built on a Windows version of the XAMPP stack, “an easy to install Apache distribution containing Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl.”[1] Itis deployed on a removable computer storage device (e.g. a typical USB drive).Since the users of the system potentially will have many travels to bridge sites, the main advantage of having this deployment method is that it enables the users to take the system with them to their site visits.