Project Description
Lakewood Infrastructure Monitoring
IoT Collaborative
Smart City Project Overview
City of Lakewood personnel invited the IoT Collaborative to serve on Lakewood’s Resiliency Task Force. Faculty members at CWRU and CSU in Engineering and Urban Studies were interested in how sensors deployed on city vehicles might be used to improve real-time road infrastructure monitoring and a municipality’s operational efficiency. The IoT Collaborative connected the groups, and the City of Lakewood became a partner. The IoT Collaborative has deployed sensor systems (including vibration to measure pavement quality and ground-penetrating radar) on a City of Lakewood service vehicle and has collected data for months. The collected data was transformed through analytics to provide an indicator of pavement quality that was then overlaid on a Google map of the city, with subjective pavement quality scores determined by visual inspection. Ultimately, the IOTC created an up-to-date map of pavement quality across all roads in the city. This foundational work led directly to a joint CWRU-CSU award from the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA) to investigate unexpected wheel wear on the Red Line and reduce operational expenses. Sensor and software systems similar to those used in the City of Lakewood are being deployed on the GCRTA Red Line to acquire and analyze data. The IoT Collaborative Lakewood project led to a $3.5 million proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Smart and Connected Communities research funding opportunity. Our proposal is currently under review at NSF.
Organization's mission and/or purpose
The IoT Collaborative drives transdisciplinary research and education in digital innovation to spur economic transformation and improve the quality of life for residents of Greater Cleveland
Collaborating organizations involved
- City of Lakewood
- Greater Cleveland RTA
- Case Western Reserve University
- Cleveland State University
Project Links
IMPACT STATEMENT
We hope the project leads to operational efficiencies for municipal governments and other infrastructure owners – providing continuous, real-time feedback on the infrastructure quality. The insights provided by the system will allow maintenance organizations to make data-driven decisions on repairs and infrastructure investments and to identify emerging problems before they become catastrophic.
Project point
Ken Loparo, Ph.D.
[email protected]